LIBRAR Y OF CON GRESS. 

CIiap,.__r____, D ipyright No. 

sMfJLQ 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 



SIX LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE 
THE LOWELL INSTITUTE 



BY 



E. WINCHESTER DONALD 

RECTOR OF TRINITY CHURCH 

IN THE CITY OF 

BOSTON 




\^\%, 



i 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1896 






"EKss 



Copyright, 1896, 
By E. WINCHESTER DONALD. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. 



TO ONE 

WHOSE UNCONSCIOUS BUT POWERFUL INFLUENCE 

WROUGHT WITH ME 

IN THE MAKING OF THIS BOOK 



PREFACE 



These Lectures do not claim to be original, 
eloquent, erudite, or academic. They are the 
record of a working clergyman's sober thinking 
upon a subject, profound interest in which is 
coterminous with the life of man. As such a 
record only, they are offered to the public. 

E. WINCHESTER DONALD. 

Trinity Rectory, 
Boston, Massachusetts, 
yanuary> i8g6. 



CONTENTS 



I. Religion and Salvation . . . . i 

II. The New Anthropology ... 49 

III. Religion and Righteousness ... 98 

IV. Religion and Industrialism . . . 151 
V. Religion and Socialism .... 208 

VI. Organized Religion .... 258 



THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 



RELIGION AND SALVATION. 

The earliest universal interest of man- 
kind is its latest. Religion still stands in 
the foremost files of the worlds passionate 
wishes, and equally of its most strenuous 
endeavors; and it touches and colors, in 
frank or subtle ways, all the outcomes of 
man's many-sided life. No longer re- 
garded as the sole possession of organiza- 
tion and formal statement, it is rather an 
atmosphere in which the healthy life of man 
is most successfully lived. No longer 
identified with particular expressions of 
the great world's career, no longer thought 
of as something technical and arbitrary, 
which experts must make intelligible to 
the people, it is now, to our spiritual con- 
ception, like the sunlight which enters 



2 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

unbidden into every least bit of space that 
is open to its gracious presence. The sole 
condition of its possibility for every man 
is openness to the incoming of the Di- 
vine. The sole condition of its personal 
possession is sensitiveness and responsive- 
ness to the Divine. It employs organiza- 
tion, it does not require it. It admits of 
statement, but lives without it. It wel- 
comes the symbol, but refuses to be bound 
by symbol. It tolerates the most splendid 
and gorgeous ritual, it thrives and blos- 
soms in loneliest hut on the shore of the 
most lonely and distant sea. It stirs the 
heart of the pygmy in the dark forest, and 
animates the soul of the tenant of the Vat- 
ican. The breath of God, the life of man, 
the heat of the heart, the vigor of the will, 
the liveness of the conscience, the one 
great hope of human nature set in this 
brilliant, beautiful, sad, and restless world, 
is still that mighty force which we call 
Religion. 

The conviction that this is true will un- 
derlie all that I shall say in these lectures. 
I cannot claim that I come coldly to study 
a vigorous force of the past, the spent force 



RELIGION AND SALVATION. 3 

of the present ; for I am here rather as one 
who believes that Religion is seeing its best 
days, that it is asserting itself in quarters 
wherein it has frequently been regarded as 
an intrusion, and that it is assuming forms 
which, as yet, only spiritual eyes can recog- 
nize. The moment Religion was eman- 
cipated from the tyranny of sacred con- 
ventions, the moment it was trusted to 
take care of itself out in the great world of 
living men, it began, by virtue of its own 
divine force, to occupy all territory whereon 
were ideas, emotions, purposes, struggling 
to realize themselves in achievements. So 
long as Religion was described in state- 
ment, and uttered itself only in arbitrary 
and conventional conduct, it stood a poor 
chance to become the impulse and nourish- 
ment of the total life of man. Judge Sewall 
knew where Religion began and where it 
ended in the social and personal life of the 
seventeenth century. It began with a cor- 
rect notion and ended in correct conduct. 
How narrow, provincial, ascetic, that notion 
was, how hard and hardening that conduct 
came to be, his " Diary " bountifully shows. 
The expansion of Religion was unthinkable 



4 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

two hundred years ago. To have given it 
the ample freedom it possesses now would, 
to English and New England thinking, 
have caused it to disappear as completely 
as Christianity has vanished from many of 
those cities of Asia Minor to which St. 
John wrote his striking and now pathetic 
letters. Religion was not trusted as we 
trust sunlight and storm ; it was guarded 
like crown jewels, which, if passed from 
hand to hand, may be lost, and, once lost, 
lost forever. It was looked at through 
glass. It is inability to perceive what a 
free force Religion is which explains the 
widely entertained opinion that Religion 
to-day is decaying. The disappearance of 
Fast Day counts for more than the ap- 
pearance of the conviction in the public 
thinking that to house human beings in a 
tenement the plumbing arrangements of 
which are a constant and cordial welcome 
to disease, is a moral crime. The disuse 
of the old Catechism is held to be indica- 
tive of waning Religion, but the erection 
and maintenance of a child's dispensary, 
of baby shelters, and the annual summer 
exodus of enough of the city's little ones 



RELIGION AND SALVATION 5 

to lower the rate of infant mortality, fails 
widely to be interpreted as a direct result 
of Religion regnant. Again, what has been 
aptly termed the " theological thaw " of the 
last quarter of a century is too frequently 
set down as decisive of the melting out 
from the spiritual life of the community 
of the imperative sanctions of duty, and 
no less of the universal sense of awe and 
reverence in the presence of the eternal 
mysteries of life and death. And the ease 
with which so august an organization as 
a Church is created by a handful of dis- 
affected and fanatical, or earnest and con- 
scientious, men and women, has been ac- 
cepted as indubitable proof that all religion 
is no better than the outcome of human 
hopes or fears, employed by society to 
furnish direction and refinement to enthu- 
siasms tolerated by the state as helpful in 
keeping its citizens in order. 

It is not misrepresentative of our time, 
therefore, to describe it as unreasonably 
despondent about the present prospects of 
Religion. One set of men deplores the 
decay of authority, meaning thereby really 
nothing more than the blessed powerless- 



6 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

ness of organization to compel assent to its 
dogmas by the exercise of force. Another 
set of men bewails the gradual disappear- 
ance of the multitude's willingness to ac- 
cept as true what is uttered in sacred 
places in solemn tones. And still another 
set is disheartened at the withdrawal of 
enthusiasm from stated worship, and its 
bountiful and beautiful gift of itself to what 
still are called secular and philanthropic 
activities. 

I have said enough to explain why a 
clergyman, who makes no pretension to 
erudition, ventures to speak to his fellows 
of the expansion of Religion, dares to give 
his reasons for believing that Religion was 
never more active, more diffused, more 
hopefully energetic, than it is to-day. For 
I hope to be able to show by a calm and 
dispassionate summary of facts that are 
open to the inspection and verification of 
us all, and by a rational interpretation of 
their meaning, that Religion is to-day far 
more widely diffused, far more fruitfully 
and faithfully used, than when Samuel 
Sewall tried to comfort his little son, 
Samuel, sobbing with mingled fright and 



RELIGION AND SALVATION 7 

sorrow at the solemn services of his kins- 
man's funeral, by quoting to him the text, 
" O death, where is thy sting ? O grave, 
where is thy victory ? " One wishes he 
have might taken the little boy into his 
arms and kissed away his fears. 

But it is time to say frankly what we 
mean by Religion as we shall use the word 
in our lectures. I am glad to believe, and 
I do believe, that the idolater, kneeling in 
blind hope or stupid terror at the feet of 
his hideous or fantastic idol, is as truly 
religious as the Romanist hushed and awed 
at the Elevation of the Host, or as the Lib- 
eral passionately moved by the splendid 
utterance of the great divine truth of the 
Fatherhood of God. I can imagine my- 
self kneeling, in a great temple of Buddha 
in Japan, or in the magnificent mosque of 
St. Sofia, by the side of the Buddhist or 
the Moslem, sure that my prayer and theirs 
reach the listening ear of the one Father 
which is in Heaven, and that God an- 
swers us both. It has ever seemed to me 
a bit of logical folly to point to the uni- 
versality of man's belief in Deity as proof 
that there is a God, and in the same breath 



8 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

declare that the god of the pagan and 
heathen is no god at all. Abruptly to con- 
vince the heathen that his idol god is no- 
thing is to do one's best to plunge him into 
atheism, not to lift him up into the Chris- 
tian theism. I think if I were a mission- 
ary in Japan, I should begin my work of 
unfolding Christianity by worshiping Al- 
mighty God, Maker of heaven and earth, 
in a temple of Buddha, and I should ex- 
plain and defend my act by quoting the 
words of Jesus, " I am come not to de- 
stroy, but to fulfill." Religion, real Reli- 
gion, is in very truth the common posses- 
sion of all mankind, and " varieties of 
religions " means simply different reports 
or conceptions of one universal force or 
fact. Religion in the heart of man is 
everywhere the same in kind. The crude 
article is in Boston what it is in Ahmed- 
nuggur. But Religion in history, in organ- 
ization, statement, ritual, is as various as 
are the climates, civilizations, customs, and 
inventions of innumerable nations and 
tribes. Its unity is divine, its variations 
are for the most part historical and human. 
That is to say, the unreasoned feeling or 



RELIGION AND SALVATION g 

the reflected conviction that each human 
being is related to Deity, and that this 
relation can be realized by some sort of 
means, are at the heart of all Religion. 
The terror of the savage is the germ of the 
Christian awe. The Christian's contrite 
prayer is the blossoming of the pagan's 
attempt to purchase the Deity's favor by 
something done or something sacrificed. 
The sacred dance of the islander is of a 
piece with the jubilant psalm of the Chris- 
tian, exulting in his deliverance from his 
material danger or his spiritual foe. All 
forms of Religion, even the Religion of 
Jesus, if only we track them back far 
enough, will be found rooted in a single 
fact, — the soul's instinctive, fundamental, 
ineradicable feeling, or conviction, that it 
stands in a real relation to Deity, and 
that this relation is capable of conscious 
and continuous realization by action, — 
the adoration of an idol, the burning of 
a beast, the offering of a prayer. And 
that is what I shall mean by Religion 
generically in my lectures. Ten years ago, 
I might have regarded this statement as 
accepted and irritating commonplace ; but 



IO THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

as one listens to many of our missionary 
addresses and reads a good deal of our 
missionary literature, he perceives the ne- 
cessity of stating, with a flagrant plainness, 
that to think of Religion, in its elemental 
idea, as anything other than one the wide 
world over and all the centuries through, 
is to slip into the pit of hopeless bewilder- 
ment or to take fatal refuge in the paddock 
of provincialism. That there is one God 
is a truism until the heathen holds up his 
hideous or fantastic idol, and cries to the 
Christian, " Is this God ? " until a rigid, 
pitiless, marvelously well reasoned cate- 
chism implicitly asks, Is this God the 
God ? It is only as one sees clearly, and 
holds intelligently, a conception of Religion 
which is capable of roofing in every form 
of it, that there is so much as a chance of 
profound and unconquerable belief in it as 
the outcome of the Eternal Spirit working 
in the human soul. If one's philosophy of 
Religion can sweep away as human rubbish 
the idea which underlies even so horrible 
a thing as cannibalism in its primitive pur- 
pose, it may turn out that it can sweep 
away the idea expressed in the purest 



RELIGION AND SAL VA TION 1 1 

worship ever offered up to Almighty God. 
Through and by the root, set deep in the 
rich soil of our humanity by the hand of 
God, can Religion live, however it may be 
nourished, strengthened, and disciplined by 
revelation and enlightened human thought. 
And I like to believe that this idea of it, 
upon which I have dwelt so long, is con- 
sonant to that conception of it which was 
held by the large minded, deep hearted 
founder of this Lecture Course. For it 
was at Luxor, on the site of Thebes, hard 
by the colossal ruins of El Karnak, mas- 
sive testimony to the puissant influence of 
a form of Religion that has ceased to be, 
on the banks of the river which flows past 
more, and more magnificent, marks of or- 
ganized Religion than any stream in all the 
world, that Mr. Lowell executed the codicil 
that created the foundation upon which 
to-night's lecturer is privileged to stand. 
Those huge monoliths spake to him of an 
ancient faith in God of which the family 
church in far off Boston was a true de- 
velopment. He must have felt that belief 
in God, however strangely named, however 
imperfectly described and weirdly wor- 



12 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

shiped, was indissolubly bound up with an 
ancient people's moral life, just as belief 
in Jesus Christ and His revelation of the 
Father's nature was firmly linked in with 
the moral behavior of the people of Massa- 
chusetts. Because there was Religion in 
every one of the strange lands to which 
his travels bore him, because the evidences 
of Religion, among peoples whose civiliza- 
tion had long ago disappeared, were pre- 
eminently characteristic of the remains of 
those civilizations, he profoundly and pas- 
sionately felt that only by Religion, per- 
petually translating itself into morals, can 
men be secure of happiness in this world 
and in that which is to come. The Lec- 
tures were to show the " conformity of 
natural Religion " — that natural Religion 
which I have already defined — " to that 
of our Saviour." 

Here, then, is the distinct assertion that 
Natural Religion is in conformity with 
the religion of Jesus. It is the assertion 
that just as the tree, standing in stalwart 
strength, conforms to the slender sapling 
out of which it grew; just as the broad 
river, bearing upon its bosom the navies 



RELIGION AND SALVATION. 13 

of the world, conforms to the stream which 
has sung its way down from its native 
hills; or just as to-day's civilization con- 
forms to the ancient civilizations whose 
developed child it is, — so the Religion of 
Jesus conforms to the Religion of Abraham, 
of India, of the "summer isles of Eden 
lying in dark purple spheres of sea." This 
may seem on its face like surrendering the 
claim of Christianity to be the universal 
religion that is to be, like reducing it to 
the level of all Religions, differing, as the 
phrase is, " not in kind but in degree," 
from, say, Buddhism or Shintoism. But 
let us understand exactly what we mean 
by this phrase. It may be said that all 
oak trees differ from each other only in 
degree, since they are all oaks. And this 
is true. And yet it must be that white 
oaks and red oaks differ in kind, and that 
some intrinsically different sort of sap or 
leaf function must be working in them 
adequately to account for diversities which 
inexpert eyes easily discern. This also 
is true. Certain fundamental likenesses 
make them oaks ; certain equally funda- 
mental qualities make them white or red. 



14 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

Degree and kind are not contradictory 
or mutually exclusive of each other, when 
degree and kind are working in the same 
organism. It does not affront us when we 
are assured that Buddhism and Confucian- 
ism differ only in degree, nor does it con- 
tradict our knowledge to affirm, also, that 
they differ in kind as well. Just why it 
is either perilous or untrue to assert that 
Christianity " differs in degree " from any 
Religion which has been a living force upon 
this earth, it is hard to say, nor has it 
ever been explained. Christianity is a far 
richer and nobler form of Religion than 
Taoism, for example ; yet each has a com- 
mon root. Christianity is immeasurably 
truer to human instinct than Zoroastrian- 
ism, because Jesus has perfectly revealed 
the nature of God and perfectly stated in 
word and life the wish and will of God for 
man ; but none the less Zoroastrianism 
and Christianity are the same in their ele- 
mental truth. The disciples of each wor- 
ship the same God, however different be 
their report of what they mean by God 
and of what He wishes men to become. 
Every Religion which is " natural," which 



RELIGION AND SALVATION 15 

issues from the universal human instinct 
that man has a real relation to God and 
that that relation can be realized by action, 
conforms to the Religion of Jesus. Chris- 
tianity is possessed of truths of which the 
heart of the Dark Continent has never 
dreamed. Christianity is moved by a pur- 
pose to which much of India is yet a 
stranger, but its most characteristic truths 
and purposes are the developments of 
truths and purposes which have haunted 
the nature of mankind " since the first 
man stood, God conquered, with his face 
to heaven upturned." To foreshadow the 
meaning of the title I have given these 
lectures, Christianity is the great expan- 
sion of Religion, not simply of Judaism, 
but of every form of Religion which has 
sensitized the conscience, invigorated the 
will, and directed the hopes of mankind. 
So far from lowering the Religion of Jesus 
to the level of the so-called man-made reli- 
gions, this conception of it lifts it clean 
out of every petty, partial, provincial no- 
tion of it, and sets it in the heaven of 
humanity's variant yet ever related beliefs, 
there to shine as the star whose magnitude 



1 6 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

and beauty dims all its sister stars, yet 
reflecting, like them, the beams of the one 
Eternal Sun, sole source of heat and light. 
It is this conception of Christianity 
which is every year becoming more and 
more that of all wide-minded and deep- 
hearted Christian thinkers. And it is no 
insignificant indication of the marvelous 
progress made towards the simplification 
of Christendoms apprehension of the es- 
sential unity of all Religion that one may 
make this frank and I hope lucid statement 
of the relation of Christianity to any Reli- 
gion whatever, without instantly meeting 
a prompt challenge, perhaps something 
more serious. Indeed, it is not extrava- 
gant to claim that to-day men find it easier 
and more rational to believe that Chris- 
tianity is destined to gather into itself the 
Religions of the world, when it is recog- 
nized as of kin with every Religion, than 
when it was regarded as bound by no 
vital, necessary, indestructible ties to every 
least belief of man in his God. For if we 
could find a nation to which the idea of 
Deity is as inconceivable as that of light 
to eyeless fishes in the lakes of subter- 



RELIGION AND SALVATION 17 

ranean caverns, to which worship is as 
unthinkable as the distance from March 
eight to the State House gate, the pro- 
posal to send to that nation the story told 
in our Gospels, with the hope that it 
would be so much as possible that they 
could receive it, would not find a sup- 
porter whose intelligence was not in seri- 
ous dispute. The sure warrant for believ- 
ing in the final supremacy of Christianity 
is its essential kinship to and its manifest 
completion of the capacity to know and 
love God, which lives in every man be- 
cause every man is made in the image of 
God. The more eagerly the missionary 
insists that the Religion of Jesus is a mes- 
sage of brotherly welcome to the Religion 
which builds temples on the banks of the 
Ganges, the sooner will Jesus be hailed as 
the long-expected Saviour by the multi- 
tudes who fill those heathen temples with 
their prayers and the smoke of their sac- 
rifices. 

I claim, therefore, that that is a true ex- 
pansion of Religion which has lifted Chris- 
tianity, as we know it here in America, up 
out of the narrow notion of it as standing 



1 8 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

in solitary grandeur among the faiths of 
the world to which it has no ties of spirit- 
ual kinship, and is setting it forth as the 
evolutionary, divine fulfillment of what has 
been living and growing in the heart of 
man since the day he was placed upon 
this earth with a nature that had in it the 
potency of government, civilization, art, 
worship, invention, skill, and love. What 
may still be regarded in some quarters 
as an evidence of decay is thus seen to 
be the mark of vitality. The larger, the 
older, the more comprehensive Religion is 
conceived to be, the more absolute is its 
necessity, the more solidly firm is its pos- 
session of mankind. 

I have perhaps sufficiently — more than 
sufficiently — indicated why, to my think- 
ing, Religion needs no defense. It rests 
not upon arguments and institutions, but 
upon humanity itself. It will abide, not 
because of the clever ingenuity of logi- 
cians, nor of the well fortified erudition of 
scholars ; it will abide because man is man. 
He did not make himself ; God made him 
— made him capable of love and hate, 
of sleeping and waking, of dreaming and 



RELIGION AND SALVATION. 19 

doing ; capable, also, of knowing and loving 
his Maker. What he is, he is. And he 
is no more compelled to hunger for meat 
than to hunger for God. The history of 
humanity's search for God is as true, as 
characteristic, as that of its search for food. 
Man plants his fields and rears his temples 
because from the one he gathers the grain 
that nourishes his body, and in the other 
finds the sense of mystery and awe and 
reverence which feed his soul. What he 
is, he is, and he is religious. The one 
plain, persistent, venerable fact about him 
is that he has. always been on the lookout 
for God, and the story of his search and 
his discoveries is the history of Religion. 

Not, then, as an apologist of a decaying, 
but as the interpreter of an expanding 
force, I come to speak, believing that a true 
interpretation of movements and achieve- 
ments, at the close of the century, which 
apparently mark the recession of Chris- 
tianity from the life of the people, will re- 
veal, rather, that religion is more and more 
taking firm possession of every human 
interest and endeavor, perpetually trans- 
lating itself into organizations, enthusi- 



20 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

asms, and struggles, which, as yet, are 
largely unaware of the true nature of the 
force which gave them birth and is sup- 
plying them with the life without which 
they must die. 

If we have correctly and sufficiently 
indicated wherein religions are alike, it is 
time to develop wherein they differ. Their 
most obvious difference is in their report 
of the nature of God. The self-torture, 
the self-effacement, of the devotee of India 
is the outcome of an untrue conception 
of the nature of God. If God be what 
he thinks Him, his self-torture is natural. 
Man seeks to become what he believes 
God would have him be. 1 If you believe 
God is only force, then Religion will be a 
struggle to get on the right side of God, 
or to get out of His way altogether. 
Every Religion that has been, bountifully 
illustrates that very simple truth. Reli- 
gions do not make gods, but gods make 
Religion. A god who is conceived as bru- 
tal, lustful, capricious, and cruel, makes 
a brutal, licentious, shifty, and unmerci- 
ful Religion. The heathen who lashes his 

1 Fairbairn, Religion in History and Modern Life. 



RELIGION AND SALVATION. 21 

idol in maddened fury, because a boon is 
withheld, believes in a god of weakness. 
When Jacob made his bargain with the 
Almighty, saying, " If God will be with 
me, and will keep me in this way that I 
go, and will give me bread to eat and rai- 
ment to put on, so that I come to my father's 
house in peace, then shall the Lord be my 
God," he had in mind a deity whose nature 
was open to ordinary considerations of 
barter and exchange. What a man thinks 
God is, inexorably determines what his 
Religion comes at last to be. And the rea- 
son no Religion remains fixed and final, the 
reason it is difficult, and sometimes impos- 
sible, to determine with exactitude what 
the tenets of a particular Religion are, is its 
perpetual tendency to develop, in the direc- 
tion either of spirituality or materialism, of 
refinement or degradation, its conception 
of the nature of the god it worships and 
adores. It is both unhistorical and irra- 
tional to hold that Religions have created 
gods. No one would say that a hundred 
years of successful government in Amer- 
ica, and of an ever ripening civilization, 
originated the idea of government which 



22 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

is embodied in our Constitution. On 
the contrary, out of it, interpreted and ex- 
pounded by the authoritative utterances of 
the Supreme Court, and realized in con- 
crete laws enacted by the legislature and 
enforced by the executive, has flowed the 
great stream of our national life. So long 
as our Constitution remains unchanged, 
government, and all that government 
means to institutions and peoples, will 
remain substantially what it is. So the 
idea of God which man holds will inex- 
orably determine the character of his Re- 
ligion. Religion will expand, will grow 
truer, better, more beneficent, as the na- 
ture of God, disclosed by revelation, appre- 
hended by more accurate, patient, and 
humble study of His purposes in nature 
and history and man, is slowly developed 
in human thought. To originate a new 
Religion, we must first procure a fresh God. 
To displace an old Religion, we must first 
show that the old god is no longer ade- 
quate. To attempt to reverse the process 
is both impossible and unphilosophical, as 
all history abundantly declares. 

In its conception of the nature of God, 



RELIGION AND SALVATION 23 

Religion has witnessed a marvelous expan- 
sion in the last half-century. Retaining 
its firm hold upon the ideas of justice and 
righteousness, adding richly to the idea of 
power manifested in law as against caprice 
and arbitrariness (even when consecrated 
by so dear a name as "special providence"), 
it has developed marvelously the idea of 
love, not only as an amiable quality, but 
as a magnificent force. The prolonged 
emphasis that accents the doctrine of the 
Fatherhood of God, which has become 
the commonplace of modern preaching, 
and which the present generation accepts 
as a matter of course, has, perhaps, ob- 
scured its real importance as a distinct 
addition to the idea of God to which mod- 
ern times have attained. So recent a 
writer as Mr. Fiske has given a child's 
picture of God, which many here to-night 
will recognize as representative of the 
conception of their own childhood. " I 
imagined," he says, " a narrow office, just 
over the zenith, with a tall standing desk 
running lengthwise, upon which lay several 
open ledgers bound in coarse leather. 
There was no roof over this office, and 



24 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

the walls were scarcely five feet from the 
floor, so that a person standing at the desk 
could look out upon the whole world. 
There were two persons at the desk, one 
of them — a tall slender man of aquiline 
features, wearing spectacles, with a pen in 
his hand, and another behind his ear — 
was God. The other, whose appearance 
I do not distinctly recall, was an attendant 
angel. Both were diligently watching the 
deeds of men and recording them in the 
ledgers. To my infant mind this picture 
was not grotesque, but ineffably solemn ; 
and the fact that all my deeds and words 
were thus written down to confront me at 
the day of judgment seemed naturally a 
matter of grave concern." I doubt if any 
child of to-day, reared in a household 
whose religious life is correctly represen- 
tative of contemporary Christianity, would 
give us such a picture now. He might, 
to be sure, paint in a picture quite as 
anthropomorphic, but instead of a tireless 
watcher and bookkeeper, resolute to set 
down what is, careless whether what is 
be right or wrong, lovely or unlovely, we 
should see a colossal father with the 



RELIGION AND SALVATION 25 

world's children gathered about his knee, 
affectionately praising their little victories 
over tiny temptations, tenderly chiding 
their naughtiness, and gently urging them 
to live sweet, pure lives. Mr. Fiske, to be 
sure, was contending that " unless one s 
thought is capable of ranging far and wide 
over the universe, it is impossible to frame 
a conception of God which is not grossly 
anthropomorphic." But the special sort 
of anthropomorphism his childish fancy 
employed is unerringly indicative of the 
common ideas taught him in his early 
years respecting the occupation, interest, 
and activity of God. The anthropomor- 
phism of to-day's child, as it pictures God 
in heaven, with equal certainty indicates 
what ideas of God it has been taught or 
has unconsciously absorbed, and, there- 
fore, what ideas of God are now the com- 
mon possession of all religious people in 
our land and time. Nothing so definitely 
demonstrates the expansion of Religion, 
in its purely theological aspects, as the 
growth and profound influence of the idea 
of the Fatherhood of God. It means a 
new and better conception of His relation 



26 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

to His children, a new and truer appre- 
hension of the nature of His treatment of 
the world of men, a new and far more 
powerful force in drawing us towards the 
ideal of life which has forever haunted 
human spirits. It has slowly, and for the 
most part silently, insinuated itself into 
the colder hymnology of the elder Church, 
and given us hymns which voice the real 
hopes and longings, the natural devotion, 
of our hearts, warm, tender, and trustful. 
From a literary point of view, our modern 
Christian lyrics may be inferior to the vig- 
orous, stately hymns our fathers sung, — 
though that is a question we cannot argue 
to-night, • — but there can be no difference 
of opinion about the intended and wide 
difference between them as regards their 
variant conceptions of the nature of the 
God to Whom they are sung. And how- 
ever slender the warrant for making hym- 
nology do duty for theology, the religious 
songs of a people have ever been sure 
guides to the real heart of their beliefs. 
Nature's lover names the birds that sing 
in her fields and forests, by listening in 
delighted wonder to the notes which thrill 



RELIGION AND SALVATION 27 

and flood, with inimitable music, copse 
and tree and sky ; the ornithologist traps, 
kills, dissects, stuffs them, and the label is 
ready to be written. Verily, I say unto 
you, each has his reward. 

It is significant, also, that with the ex- 
pansion of Religion into a confident con- 
ception of God as our Father, the appeal 
to fear has ceased in many quarters, and 
has been almost hushed in all. A super- 
ficial explanation of the disappearance of 
this once mighty weapon in the hands of 
organized Religion assures us that, since 
sin is now regarded as disease, and there- 
fore cannot justly be punished, the neces- 
sity of the machinery of torture, whether 
penal, punitive, or disciplinary, falls to the 
ground. But it is not true. For if any- 
thing may safely be affirmed by the stu- 
dent of concrete human life, it is that con- 
science testifies to the reality of sin as the 
result of self-determination, with all the 
vigor and unpitying sternness which have 
characterized its operations from the day 
on which the first liar uttered his lie and 
knew his soul was stained. That descrip- 
tion which we read this winter of the mas- 



28 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

sive frame of the New York police officer 
drenched in sweat as the story of his un- 
speakable wickedness was drawn from his 
unwilling lips in open court, is all of a 
piece with the story of Ananias falling 
dead at Peter's feet. Conscience works 
to-day in precisely the same way it worked 
in Judea two thousand years ago. Its tes- 
timony has remained unchanged through 
all the changes of the changing years. It 
asserts that there is as much difference 
between disease and sin as between color 
and sound, distance and time. The man 
or the community that counts upon the 
final extinguishment of the sense of ill 
desert when bad deeds are done, is count- 
ing upon the extinguishment of humanity 
itself. For besides the indignation at the 
costly consequences of wrongdoing, besides 
the hot, angry vengeance which man and 
society frequently wreak upon the destroy- 
ers of their goods and peace, there is 
always a clear, strong, mordant perception 
of the intrinsic wickedness of the wrong 
itself. The permanent is the moral; the 
passing is the special forms in which the 
moral appears. The use of tobacco in 



RELIGION AND SALVATION. 29 

Wahhabee, 1 and untruthfulness in Boston, 
are regarded as the great sins ; but though 
Boston smile at Wahhabee and Wahhabee 
wonder at Boston, there lives in each the 
unshaken conviction that sin is not a dis- 
ease, but is forever, while man is man, the 
outcome of an exercise of the power of self- 
determination. It is clear, then, that the 
disappearance of appeals to mans fear of 
torment in a world to come cannot be due 
to the disappearance of man's conviction 
that he can be wicked or that he is wicked. 
But when one reflects upon the fullness 
and force with which the idea of the Fa- 
therhood of God has been presented in the 
last quarter of our century, and how com- 
pletely it has possessed our religious think- 
ing and worship, it ought not to be re- 
garded as strange that the old insistence 
upon the certainty of vengeance, uttering 
itself in endless torture of the wicked, 
should die away. Torture and a father 
cannot go together. If torture is to re- 
main, fatherhood must first disappear. If 
fatherhood is to be the root idea in our 
conception of God, then torture disappears 

1 Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology. 



30 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

as naturally as does the darkness when the 
sunshine comes over the mountain top. 
There was no noisy battle between the idea 
of God as a bookkeeper recording the ac- 
tions which one day should become fuel 
for everlasting fires, and the idea of God 
as full of paternal yearning for His chil- 
dren's love and unloosing His punish- 
ments only to discipline and deter ; just as 
there can be no fierce conflict when the 
innocence of childhood passes into the 
knowledge of the grown man. The de- 
cline, therefore, of the effort to create fear 
— though terror is the more descriptive 
word — as a means of securing man's 
obedience to God, and equally the refusal 
of men any longer to be coerced by it into 
acceptance of doctrines or conformity to 
observances, so far from indicating a weak- 
ening of Religion, rather attest its in- 
creased vitality ; for the obedience of love 
is ever more valuable, more lasting, more 
significant, than the compliance of fear, 
just as the willing obedience of the volun- 
teer is better than the enforced obedience 
of the drafted man, as the free, intelligent 
loyalty of the citizen, who never thinks of 



RELIGION AND SAL VA TION. 3 1 

jails and fines, is more significant of the 
city's order than the multitudes cowed by 
the police. 

Before my eye are two stout volumes of 
theology, the pathetic monument of the 
industry, learning, culture, and logical acu- 
men of one of the gentlest souls and ripest 
scholars this or any country has produced, 
and whose author has within a year 1 gone 
home to God. In it two pages are devoted 
to Heaven, and eighty-nine treat of Hell. 
It is the record of the age that has died, 
not of the age that is alive. The theolo- 
gian of to-day would reverse the propor- 
tions, would sing of the " sweet and blessed 
country," and would leave to the fuller 
revelations of the future the disclosure 
of the meaning of a God who loves as a 
father, yet chastises every son whom He 
receiveth. 

Equally characteristic is the complete 
freedom of the intellect in its search for 
truth. The sole authority in Religion is 
truth demonstrated, fact verified. And 
there can be no other. For if men accept 

1 The Reverend William Greenough Thayer Shedd, 
D. D. 



32 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

any " outward authority " in Religion, or in 
science, or art, or government, it is only 
because that authority has proved itself 
competent by the character of the truth 
and fact for which it vouches. In a sense, 
every trained electrician is an authority 
to the timid layman threading his cautious 
way among wires and dynamos. His warn- 
ings of danger and his assurances of safety 
are unquestioningly accepted. I dare not 
touch what he forbids me to go near, I 
boldly tread where he asserts there is no 
possibility of harm. I will not so much as 
enter the laboratory or generating room 
unless he guide me. He is my authority, 
absolute, unquestioned. Apparently I have 
given up my private judgment. But only 
apparently. For every step I take, every 
act of avoidance of the deadly wire, and 
every confident touch I lay upon an instru- 
ment, mean the continuity of the working 
of my private judgment, which assures 
me that I am following a safe guide. Let 
the electrician tell me that the live wire 
is dead, and I follow him no longer. The 
fact that private judgment accepts an 
" authority " inevitably means that private 



RELIGION AND SALVATION 33 

judgment may at any time reject it. It is 
a clear perception of this truth which has 
emancipated the human intellect, leaving 
it free to accept or reject religious or any 
truth without incurring outward penalties. 
But that perception is not due to a suc- 
cessful assault upon ecclesiastical power, 
it is the result of that expansion of Reli- 
gion which ensued the moment God was 
regarded as our Father. The sequence 
is, perhaps, not immediately apparent. Let 
me try to illustrate. The domestic gov- 
ernment of an orphan asylum is necessarily 
different from that of a family. It pro- 
ceeds upon the recognition that the chil- 
dren under its care cannot be supplied 
with the sort of discipline and education 
which as children they need and of which 
they have been providentially deprived. It 
must needs make a set of rules and set up 
a machinery for their enforcement. Even 
when, as in our later, wiser days, the at- 
tempt is made to rob the asylum of its in- 
stitutional character and clothe it with the 
semblance of a home, it is only too pain- 
fully evident that the asylum child feels 
the sanctions of its artificial home rather 



34 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

than the love which is undoubtedly behind 
those sanctions. Fear of the consequences 
of bad behavior acts more powerfully than 
hope of the rewards of good behavior ; and 
the reason is that inevitably the punish- 
ments of wrong-doing are more definite, 
more concrete, more certain than the re- 
wards of well-doing. The importance of 
obedience is emphasized, even if obedience 
is not almost wholly secured, by dread 
of the sure consequences of disobedience. 
This is not because the matron's heart is 
not overrunning with a pitiful love for the 
fatherless children under her care, not be- 
cause the government of the institution 
has been deliberately planned to exclude 
the idea or the methods of parenthood, but 
simply because no one and nothing can 
take the place of a parent. Upon a totally 
different basis is built up the government 
of a home. The one thought which fills 
a true child's mind in a true home is that 
of the gladness and depth and tenderness 
of the personal love which runs out to it 
from the fountains of a parental heart. 
And love means mental freedom, just as 
fear means mental restriction. The father 



RELIGION AND SALVATION. 35 

bids the child try to discover the essential 
reasonableness of the family command- 
ments by seeing how they all grow out of 
a passionate love of it, how they could not 
be uttered unless there were an absolute 
conviction with the father, and a growing 
conviction with the child, that every one of 
them is rooted in a wisdom and love which 
it will be the glory of sonship to discover. 
The wise father unfolds his truth to his 
boy just as fast as the boy is able to re- 
ceive it, and the father's delight is keenest 
when he knows that his son, freely ponder- 
ing upon any of the family laws, has dis- 
covered that it is resting, not upon an arbi- 
trary enactment, but upon the truth of the 
father's and family's essential nature. Fa- 
therhood, then, means freedom to the chil- 
dren in the realm of truth, and the family 
life is at its best, not when every child 
assents to a single statement of what the 
family belief may be, but when every child 
is most conscientiously endeavoring to find 
out what that belief should be and what 
are the grounds upon which it rests. If 
every member of the household is true and 
pure and honest, it is a united and happy 



36 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

household, even if no two of them hold 
identical opinions as to the nature of the 
bond that binds them and makes them 
one. 

The Fatherhood of God, held as a firm 
personal belief, exerts the same influence 
upon the intellectual activities of His chil- 
dren as they freely study the nature of His 
truth and world. The idea of God as a 
father repudiates the necessity of homo- 
geneous beliefs ; it rather insists upon the 
absoluteness of loyalty to Him. Just as 
the child who conscientiously believes that 
the purpose of his father is the family's 
education, will not dispute his brother who 
has, with equal conscientiousness, been led 
to believe that the father's purpose is the 
family's refinement, because both are loyal 
to that father, and eager to do his will, so 
any man who has come to believe that 
God has spoken to mankind only in Jesus 
Christ, will not disown, much less perse- 
cute, his brother who equally hears God's 
voice in the utterances of every saint that 
has ever lived or is living now, if both are 
first bent on loyalty to God. It does not 
disturb me if I hear men claim to have 



RELIGION AND SALVATION. 37 

found in other books what I find in the 
Bible; it no longer appals me if I hear 
other men claim that God is more real to 
them, as they watch the process by which 
nature heals the wound upon the twig or 
of the bird's body, than He is when they 
stand beneath the roof of the Christian 
Church, if only I can see the truthfulness, 
purity, and compassion which live in man 
only as man lives in God. The great 
question is not how or where do you find 
God, but have you found Him ? The mo- 
ment that question is the question of Reli- 
gion everywhere, anything like an attempt 
to secure identity of beliefs by processes 
of mere coercion becomes a solecism. But 
it is becoming the question of mankind 
more and more, not because the state has 
forbidden the use of force in the prosecu- 
tion of religious enterprise or in the per- 
secution of heresy, nor yet because of the 
mysterious rise of the " gospel of free 
thought," but because men have had the 
vision of God as a father and in that vision 
have clearly, and let us hope, forever, per- 
ceived that His truth is to be learned like 
any truth, through the rational and free 



38 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

and honest processes of the intellect. I 
do not think this fact has been adequately, 
or enough lucidly, set forth. There is still 
an impression, widely and vigorously held, 
that the emancipation of the intellect in 
the field of religion has been secured in the 
teeth of a bitter opposition on the part of 
Religion ; that Religion reluctantly yielded 
to, rather than created, the freedom in 
which we now rejoice, and that she still 
looks with sad, defeated eyes upon the 
spoliation of her fairest territory. But the 
student of Religion, looking at spiritual 
forces apart from their embodiment in or- 
ganization, perceives the evolution out of 
Religion itself of the very freedom which 
some of her mistaken, however loyal, friends 
regard as her worst enemy. Out of a full, 
almost joyous, appropriation of the idea of 
God as a father which lies at the founda- 
tion of the teaching of Jesus, and which 
our time preeminently has made familiar 
and winsome and universal, has come 
silently, and for the most part unobserved, 
that complete, magnificent, fruitful freedom 
to think straight and speak straight which, 
when the history of the end of the century 



RELIGION AND SALVATION. 39 

shall be adequately written, will shine as 
its noblest and most beneficent achieve- 
ment. The decline of the principle of 
arbitrary authority is not simply coinci- 
dent with the expansion of Religion, it is 
distinctly its creation, and when we shall 
have fully admitted it to legitimacy, we 
shall love it and honor it and glory in it, 
as a proud father rejoices in the splendid 
achievements of his illustrious son. 

The Religion of Jesus, therefore, in the 
marvelous expansion of its generic idea, 
has for its manifest outcomes the mitiga- 
tion, almost the removal, of the idea of 
torture in connection with the infliction of 
punishment, and the full-rounded doctrine 
of the freedom of the intellect in its search 
for religious truth. Christianity is identi- 
cal with all Religions in its purpose to bring 
man and God together; it differs from all 
other Religions in its conception of the na- 
ture of the God to Whom man is forever 
trying to bring himself with all his power 
of love, obedience, and adoration. 

But it is time to ask, why should man 
be brought to God ? nay, why should it be 
true that all man's history is the story of 



40 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

his unresting, never finished struggle to 
draw nigh to God ? I wish to try to an- 
swer that question as I close, because the 
answer will at once open the heart of all 
that is to follow. Let us try to answer it, 
not theologically, but in the familiar terms 
of life. 

Every Religion, the lowest and the high- 
est, alike proposes as its end man's sal- 
vation, and insists that man can be saved 
only as he knows God and does His will. 
Every Religion has succeeded in either 
winning or coercing man's allegiance only 
as it has first succeeded in persuading him 
that he is in some sort of peril from which 
he can be rescued by God alone. If the 
harvest threatens to fail, for instance, sacri- 
fice must be offered, incantations uttered, 
pilgrimages made, prayers lifted, — some- 
thing must be done to induce God to avert 
the peril. That is the crudest form which 
the religious activity assumes. The sacri- 
fice of Iphigenia, lamented through all the 
centuries and still powerful to touch our 
imaginations and move our hearts, is thor- 
oughly representative of the controlling 
purpose of the religious acts of men, how- 



RELIGION AND SAL VA TION 4 1 

ever abhorrent to us be the special form in 
which, in the Grecian legend, that pur- 
pose uttered itself. Agamemnon must be 
saved ; only the gods could save him ; only 
a favorable wind, blowing fair and free from 
Aulis, could speed his ships to the Trojan 
shore. Even a beautiful, innocent maiden, 
his own daughter, was not too great a sac- 
rifice for the offending general to make, 
nor for the offended goddess to receive, 
that Agamemnon might be saved from the 
consequences of his sacrilegious act. How 
clear it all stands out. " What shall I do 
to be saved ? " is the Hebraic phrase to 
express the Grecian thought. What shall 
I do to be saved ? is really the cry of hu- 
manity everywhere, if we listen with atten- 
tive ear. And it is the conception of what 
salvation really means in the mind of the 
man who cries out for it which explains 
what otherwise is inexplicable in the reli- 
gious worship of men. There have been 
rituals which prescribed, or at least per- 
mitted, acts which cannot so much as be 
hinted at in the ears of modern people, 
much less described ; but if one looks clean 
through their dreadful impurities, clean 



42 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

through their cruelty and inhumanness, to 
descry, if possible, the purpose which made 
them so much as thinkable in a human 
mind, he always finds a wish for something 
which is best described as salvation, escape 
from a peril, or the possession of a good. 
To-day we are absolutely united in our 
conviction that a religious man must be 
a good man ; if he is not good, he is not 
religious. The moral element in Religion 
just now overtops in imperativeness all 
else. The solidest conviction of the truth 
of immortality is not permitted to do 
duty for the virtues of honesty, truthful- 
ness, and compassion in the character of 
the religious man. That is to say, hon- 
esty, truthfulness, and compassion are 
counted the evidence of a personal salva- 
tion. The court of public opinion de- 
mands this special evidence, and will not 
order an acquittal without it. But to my 
best thinking, there has always been a 
moral element in every conception of sal- 
vation. The difference between the best 
Religion and the worst is a difference in 
conceptions of wherein morality consists, 
and, as I have been saying all along, it is 



RELIGION AND SALVATION. 43 

the nature of the god worshiped, as that 
nature is represented, or as the revelation 
of it is apprehended or misapprehended, 
which inexorably determines what the 
moral conception of salvation shall be. 
The God who is revealed as proclaiming 
to His children, " Be ye holy, for I am 
holy," inevitably compels men to believe 
that to their salvation the element of holi- 
ness absolutely belongs. The God who 
was conceived as saying, " Be ye brave, for 
I am brave," was a challenge to all his wor- 
shipers to put prowess and courage and 
recklessness of life above love, truthful- 
ness, and justice. 

Again, when it was conceived to be the 
greatest and most lasting of all perils to 
mankind that men should suffer in a world 
to come the penalties of law broken in 
this; when men took the punishments that 
belong to this world with patience, and 
accepted the harsh conditions of living 
to which they were compelled to submit 
here with something like serenity, be- 
cause assured of freedom from punish- 
ment and of possession of bliss after life in 
this world is over, it is not strange, it is 



44 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

historically and logically natural, that sal- 
vation should be regarded as mainly the 
assurance of Gods pardon and of com- 
plete immunity from the certain doom of 
those who die unpardoned. The history 
of Evangelicalism in England and America 
— that Evangelicalism to which modern 
England and America owe an incalcula- 
ble debt, to which, let us gladly assert, we 
shall forever be indebted — is strikingly 
full of this conception of human salvation. 
To be moral was not enough ; indeed, by 
a curious, and to this generation, an in- 
conceivable process of reasoning, it was 
not infrequently maintained that the pos- 
session of even the most beautiful moral 
character was consistent with the lack of 
personal salvation, perhaps stood in the 
way of the sinner's confession of his lost 
condition. A converted man was one 
who had the assurance of the divine par- 
don and the sure hope of heaven. The 
great effort of Religion, therefore, was to 
produce a conviction of sin, and thereafter 
an equally strong conviction that sin was 
forgiven and the sinner entitled to the 
hope of heaven. Salvation became, or at 



RELIGION AND SALVATION 45 

least tended to become, a limited, partial, 
almost technical matter, wholly so in the 
eye of certain well defined schools in all 
the churches; and to those who are igno- 
rant of the history which the Church and 
Religion have courageously made in the 
last quarter of a century, that is still the 
conception of what is implied in the zeal 
Religion bravely manifests to-day for what 
it persists in calling the " salvation of all 
men." But I am here to show, as I think 
I can, that to Religion to-day salvation 
means the saving of all in a human being 
which is capable of being saved, that sal- 
vation is having all that is best in a man at 
its best, that salvation is the development 
of every human faculty, the refinement of 
every quality, and the satisfaction of every 
need, which belong to him as a man. If 
any creatures powers are lying unused 
because circumstances, that can be and 
ought to be changed, are paralyzing or 
narcotizing them, Religion declares that 
that creature is not saved. If civilization 
is unnecessarily forcing any human being 
to live under outward conditions which 
keep him from bringing to ripeness the 



46 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

seeds of any sort of power which God im- 
planted in the rich soil of his nature, Reli- 
gion now asserts that that human being 
is not saved ; if any child is met on the 
threshold of life with the dreadful necessity 
of coming in daily contact with what poi- 
sons the healthy fountains of its spiritual 
energy, with what stunts its body and 
dwarfs its mind, Religion cries that that 
child is not saved, however strong be its 
faith in the certainty of God, heaven, and 
pardon. Salvation is all that is best in a 
man at its best. And Religion, as yet 
inarticulate, as yet only half conscious of 
the meaning of her mighty movement, is 
setting herself, tentatively, sometimes clum- 
sily, mistakenly, even wildly, to bring in 
the free salvation of which we have but 
begun to appreciate the beauty and grace 
and strength. The expansion of Religion 
is best observed in all those enterprises 
which seek to furnish a ministry to every 
faculty of man, however true it be that 
a competent spiritual vision sees in the 
larger, profounder, more adequate concep- 
tions of the nature of God, the eternal 
source from which they all derive their 



RELIGION AND SALVATION 47 

vitality, force, and purpose. We shall see 
that Toynbee Hall and the People's Palace, 
the University Settlement and the Wells 
Memorial, the Trades Unions, the Public 
Baths and the Day Nursery, the discon- 
tent with alms, and the treatment accorded 
those in whom is slowly being born the 
love of struggle as distinguished from that 
meted out to those in whom cowardly de- 
pendence is an ineradicable habit — all are 
symptoms of a religious purpose, as yet 
dim, unformed, directionless, which is really 
endeavoring to secure to man the condi- 
tions under which all that is best in him 
shall have the best chance to be at its best. 
Perhaps the churches may be the last offi- 
cially to recognize and claim this purpose 
as their own. No matter. Out of the 
churches mainly are to come the heat and 
light which shall keep this purpose from 
dying down, or from forever stumbling 
blindly and wildly on its way towards the 
realization of itself in the sweet, happy, 
fruitful, peaceful life of humanity. What 
the special social forms of that new life 
shall be, what the required industrial, com- 
mercial, and political changes shall be, 



48 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

what the fixed influence upon it the unre- 
claimed and irreclaimable character of the 
individual shall be, how long and how 
costly the processes by which it is achieved 
may be, no man knoweth. But what I 
think is already clear is this : that the rest- 
less movement of our time, witnessed by 
the uneasy throbbing of the great heart of 
society, and by the universal struggle to 
free itself from the conditions which seem 
at least to stunt it, proceeds out of the 
conviction, articulate or inarticulate, that 
salvation must be expanded to meet the 
requirements of a larger man to be saved. 
St. Paul, nigh two thousand years ago, 
wrote down the passionate wish of his 
great heart, " Brethren, my heart's desire 
and prayer to God for Israel is that she 
might be saved." That is the cry of Reli- 
gion to-day. But " Israel" is now mankind, 
and its salvation is the setting of every 
faculty and power of man in the frame 
that gives them the best chance ; and the 
power of salvation is still the power of 
God, to Whom, from Whom, and by 
Whom are all things in heaven and earth. 



II. 

THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 

It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, 
to exaggerate the difference in the esti- 
mates put upon the value of a human life in 
our own day and in the times that are now 
in the custody of written history. If it be 
true that the " individual withers and the 
race is more and more," it may turn out 
that the value set upon the race is solely 
to emphasize the value of the individual. 
The purpose of all social organization is 
the protection and welfare of the individ- 
ual, whatever may have been the outcome 
of that organization. The associated man 
secures what the isolated man cannot. 
The creation of a new unit is the begin- 
ning of richer blessings to the individuals 
that unite to form the new unit. The dis- 
tinct endeavor of association is to produce 
through association what without associa- 
tion cannot be. It is plain enough that 
many associations seek the good of those 



50 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

alone who compose it, and not seldom by 
wresting from outsiders what the outsid- 
ers, being unorganized, are powerless to re- 
tain. But this is indicative, not of a faulty 
purpose, but of a limited one. It is good 
as far as it goes ; it fails because it is not 
comprehensive enough. It seeks the wel- 
fare of a selected or elected company, un- 
mindful of the welfare of the mass. But 
the point which is always discernible is 
this : that association exists for the sole 
purpose of securing an advantage to indi- 
viduals. Even the costly sacrifices which 
individuals make for the maintenance of 
their association become intelligible only 
as the hope is cherished that these sacri- 
fices are eventually to be paid back, in the 
form of rich and substantial benefits, to the 
individuals. The moment associated men 
feel that the association is neither bring- 
ing, nor likely to bring, an advantage 
which is distinctly personal, the associa- 
tion is discredited and finally dissolved. 
In other words, a high value is set upon 
the worth of a human being. Instead of 
sacrificing him for the sake of organiza- 
tion, — State, Church, Society, Guild, or 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 51 

Order, all these exist to create and secure 
to him the conditions under which he may 
have the chance to live what he conceives 
to be his fullest life. 

One who is not a historian cannot draw 
from history the concrete illustrations of 
the gradual growth of the increasingly 
high estimate put upon the preciousness 
of a human soul in which history abounds. 
But one need not be a historian intelli- 
gently to read the human significance of so 
high-handed and heartless an expenditure 
of human life as the building of the Egyp- 
tian Pyramids unquestionably involved. 
Here are the tombs of kings, stupendous 
monuments, not of monarchical glory, but 
of the reckless waste of innumerable hu- 
man lives. Deep in the sands dug the 
myriad slaves, ignorant of everything save 
the stern necessity of yielding every least 
bit of strength in their bodies, and every 
least gleam of intelligence in their minds, 
to the demand of the king. Up from the 
sands it rises, that huge bulk of stone, 
testimony to the greatness of a Pharaoh, 
indestructible evidence of the cheapness 
and abundance of life. The whole is the 



52 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

tomb of a monarch, but every stone of it 
the tombstone of thousands who perished 
that this pile might rise. In the quarries 
and on the roads, on the machinery and on 
the walls, for a score of years, toiled every 
day a hundred thousand men, wageless, 
half fed, scourged, overworked, sick, dizzy, 
and exhausted. The only hospital was 
the taskmaster's whip, which stimulated 
into one last agonized effort the exhausted 
muscles of the used-up body, the frenzied 
movement of the reeling brain. Death 
was a welcome discharge, not seldom 
hastened by despair. Be it that the glory 
of the king required the speedy comple- 
tion of its symbol, be it that a too fecund 
people must needs be decimated without 
recourse to massacre, the history of the 
building of the Pyramids attests the care- 
lessly slight value set upon a thinking, 
feeling, human being made in the image 
of God. Better than statistics, more strik- 
ingly than could the graphic pages of the 
historian, more lucidly than any anthro- 
pology, those huge mountains of stone 
tell us of an age when, to reverse our Sa- 
viour's words, " a sheep was much better 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 53 

than a man." It is impossible for us to 
exaggerate the low notions of the sacred- 
ness of life which almost everywhere con- 
front us when we open the book of history 
and read. Abraham felt no weight upon 
his conscience when he made up his mind 
to slay his only son. The heart of the 
father blenched, but the ethical aspects of 
the killing did not concern him. Indeed, 
such a test of faith as he was subjected to 
could not have been applied had it been 
probable that he would ethically revolt 
against human sacrifice as an idea. God 
had promised that in his seed all the na- 
tions of the earth should be blessed. The 
sole conceivable possibility of that pro- 
mise being kept lay in the preservation 
of Isaac's life. Isaac once dead, the pro- 
mise must fail. Could Abraham kill his 
son, and still go on believing that God 
was able to keep His word ? — that, and 
not some scruple about the morality of 
human sacrifice, was the patriarch's test. 
And that test could be applied only in 
an age in which life was held cheap. Very 
likely we shall sometime see clearly that 
that misinterpretation of God s will which 



54 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

resulted in the butchery of Canaanitish wo- 
men and children was possible only among 
a people to whom had not yet come the 
perception of the preciousness of life. 
The sin of Saul in saving his prisoners 
from massacre would not have been sin at 
all had he saved them from motives of 
clemency and not of lust and gain. The 
plain fact of history is that the lower the 
estimate put upon man, the lower we shall 
find the conception of the nature of God to 
be ; and as we trace in this lecture the pro- 
gress of the idea of the exceeding great 
value of a human being, we shall see at 
every step that that idea is rooted in finer, 
more moral, more holy conceptions of what 
God is. Religion is the source of all those 
endeavors which, ignoring Religion, not in- 
frequently repudiating it, are seeking the 
reformation of human society, not merely 
in the mass, but in the concrete condi- 
tions of the individual, because Religion is 
the source of that new value given to man 
which makes saving him seem worth while. 
The first evidence of a higher value set 
upon man which I shall bring, is the estab- 
lishment of the hospital. Doubtless the 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 55 

Romans, with quick insight into the neces- 
sity of guarding against the weakening of 
their armies by disease, made special pro- 
vision for the care of disabled or diseased 
soldiers ; but only those were cared for 
who gave promise of recovery and return 
to active duty. The Greeks reckoned the 
wounded and the sick a total military loss, 
and left their disabled men to the tender 
mercies of nature. There was a plenty 
more men where the fallen came from. 
It was not until the fourth century, when 
Christianity had become a power, mainly, 
to be sure, in the state, yet widely also 
in human hearts, that the first hospital 
was founded. It was a signal recognition 
of the fact that a broken body might be, 
ought to be, repaired ; a new testimony to 
an awakened sense of the value of life, 
however prominently was associated with 
it the idea of the economic wisdom of sav- 
ing life. On from the fourth century, the 
establishment of hospitals, especially in 
connection with ecclesiastical institutions, 
grew apace, until at the beginning of the 
present century they became a fixed fea- 
ture of municipal and military life. But it 



56 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

was reserved for the last two generations to 
develop the hospital idea out of a natural 
pity for physical suffering, and of alarm 
at the loss of so much economically valu- 
able life, into the magnificent conception 
of hospitals as ministers to man's chance 
to live his life at its best on the physical 
side of it. Public interest has been so con- 
tinuously drawn to a consideration of the 
clever contrivances of the hospital system, 
to the amazing advance in surgery made 
possible by antiseptic treatment and by 
sterilization, by the ingenious devices of a 
newborn architecture, that we have seldom 
asked whence came the motive which 
called into being these matchless provi- 
sions for the treatment and cure of human 
beings. We have taken for granted that 
knowledge of methods by which sickness 
can be turned into health, twisted limbs 
made straight, and poison ejected from the 
blood, has as a matter of course resulted 
in the application of that knowledge to 
the broken bodies of men. But the mo- 
ment we reflect upon it ever so little, we 
see that explanation breaking down. For 
at the start, a pure human pity, vitalized 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 57 

by Christian love, cast about for means 
wherewith to mitigate pain. Rough and 
faulty those means were, but for the most 
part love of man called them into being. 
And running down from Fabiola's ven- 
ture of faith, inspired by Jerome, to the 
Vanderbilts' munificent provision for the 
College of Physicians and Surgeons in 
New York, medical science has confidently 
counted upon the expansion of man's piti- 
ful concern for his brother's body to sup- 
ply it with the means to establish its hos- 
pitals and bring to perfection its surgical 
and medical appliances of cure. The Mas- 
sachusetts General Hospital two hundred 
years ago is unthinkable, not because of 
the cost it implies, but because there was 
in the colony but a faint glimmer of the 
beautiful compassion for physical suffer- 
ing which beats in the heart of the Com- 
monwealth to-day. The gifts and grants 
which have made it a benediction are not 
a people's homage to the marvelous de- 
velopment of medical science and to its 
economic outcome, but a testimony to a 
people's deep-hearted, warm-hearted belief 
that no man among us should languish in 



58 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

unsanitary, ignorant, and poverty-limited 
conditions, or drag a maimed body through 
his painful years, if science can give him 
health and straightness. You cannot touch 
the motive which builds our hospitals with- 
out instantly feeling that you have your 
finger upon the heart of a religious con- 
viction that mans body must be saved 
because the man who lives in it is worth 
more than all else. The expansion of 
Religion, on that side of it which regards 
the human body, precedes and inexorably 
conditions the expansion of the hospital 
to meet the needs of suffering. It is this 
expansion of Religion also, perpetually as- 
serting the truth which long ago was ut- 
tered in the Bible — " Know ye not that 
your bodies are the temple of the Holy 
Ghost " — which has led to the separation 
of the generic hospital into hospitals for 
the sexes and for children, and finally into 
those reserved for specific diseases. At 
the end of the last century, when a stupid 
law in France, and an equally stupid one 
in England, compelled the hospital author- 
ities to receive every patient that applied 
for admission, irrespective of the crowded 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 59 

condition of the wards and the nature of 
the applicants disease, the mortality was 
so appalling that it became a serious ques- 
tion whether hospitals w 7 ere a benefit or a 
curse. As schools for instructing medical 
students in the art of healing, they were 
an undoubted success, but the growing 
philanthropy recoiled from the thought of 
securing competent medical and surgical 
knowledge at so frightful a cost in human 
life. It revolted at the sight of four, and 
even six, suffering bodies crowded into 
a single bed in a ward which rivaled in 
populousness a tenement house in Mul- 
berry Bend. " These are our brothers and 
sisters," it cried, " each with a love of life, 
each capable of exquisite suffering and ex- 
quisite joy, each entitled to a chance with 
us of finding in this world the satisfac- 
tion of the nature into which they were 
born. The modesty of woman has rights 
which are being ignorantly but none the 
less shamefully sacrificed. The timidity of 
little children is daily made the occasion 
of an agony. The chances of life for 
the mother and her newborn babe are 
destroyed by the proximity of fever and 



60 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

contagion. The sacredness of human life 
is overlaid by considerations of economy." 
That was the cry of an enlightened philan- 
thropy, of an educated political economy, 
if you like ; but only as it reached the ear 
of those who profoundly felt the essential 
preciousness of a human being was there 
so much as a chance that reform would 
enter the hospital, insisting that, at any 
pecuniary cost, men and women must be 
treated, not as cases, but as souls, not as 
organisms out of repair, but as persons, 
with all the rights of personality to a care 
and treatment which regarded a cure as 
the beautiful gate through which they 
were to go to a new life of privilege and 
endeavor. However great be the contri- 
butions of medical science to that devel- 
opment of the hospital which has revolu- 
tionized its bills of mortality, and secured 
a seemly decency to its provisions for sex 
and infancy, we shall but half account for 
these splendid achievements if we fail to 
recognize the part played by Religion in 
creating the motive which compelled the 
revolution. Without that expansion of 
Religion which witnesses to a profound 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 6 1 

and passionate belief in such a salvation for 
man as provides him with the best chances, 
and which includes in its conception of 
salvation the highest possible safety of his 
body, the evolution of the hospital out of 
something little better than a pest house 
into a system which has made the repre- 
sentative hospital the guarantee of the 
best treatment and the surest cure, could 
never have been. Out of a quickened and 
enlightened sense of the value of a man, 
which is thoroughly religious, has blos- 
somed this splendid provision for the care 
and cure of his broken body. The city 
hospital is the utterance of the city's reli- 
gious belief in mans physical salvation, 
just as a St. Vincents or a St. Margaret's 
Hospital is the expression of the Church's 
religious belief in that salvation, — the one 
as much as the other. Destroy that reli- 
gious belief, let the care of the sick be 
handed over to the mercy of economical 
considerations, and while medical know- 
ledge and surgical skill may remain, even 
increase, the sources of power to utilize 
them, to furnish them with opportunity, 
run thin and perhaps dry up. 



62 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

I do not think we can exaggerate the 
part played by Religion here. You and I 
may have been tempted by early and in- 
veterate ideas to look upon modern provi- 
sion for physical need as an indication of 
the decline of religious interest and the 
mildly hostile rise of materialism ; but 
when one calmly reflects upon the origin, 
not of knowledge and skill, but of the 
powerful motive which has seized skill and 
knowledge as instruments for the cure of 
human disease, he traces back to Religion, 
expanded and enlightened, the streams 
which are flowing through humanity to 
form a purer river of life. 

I find also that sanitary science is under 
larger obligations to religion than appears 
upon the surface. The instinct of self- 
preservation may safely be trusted to avail 
itself of every appliance known to sci- 
ence, provided that instinct is enough en- 
lightened. And in the dwellings of the 
well-to-do, in all first-class structures, 
hotels, office buildings, schools and dormi- 
tories, for the use of the well-to-do, sani- 
tary arrangements of approved and up-to- 
date perfection are expected as a matter 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 63 

of course. They are vitally necessary in 
the mansion, and economically profitable 
in all income-producing buildings whose 
tenants are alive to the dangers of bad 
sanitary conditions. And so we find them 
wherever legitimately selfish intelligence 
and competitive urgency demand them. 
But in another direction sets the religious 
spirit. Insisting upon the intrinsic value 
of man, independent of anything he pos- 
sesses and of the conditions under which 
he lives, Religion has been demanding 
that the ignorant poor shall share with the 
intelligent rich the benefits of sanitary 
science. The tenement- house question 
may turn out to be an economical one — 
for one, I think it will — but the agitation 
for the decent housing of the poor in both 
England and America has thus far been, 
not economical, but religious. It has 
never been the exclusive concern of the 
Church as an organized body, but when 
we scrutinize the nature of the motives 
of those who have been foremost in agita- 
tions for model tenement houses, we find 
them to be firmly rooted in the idea, 
which is distinctly religious, that man, just 



64 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

because he is man, with capacity to grow 
and to shrink, to rise and to sink, to be- 
come more spiritual and more bestial, is 
entitled to a material condition which 
secures him a chance to develop as the 
nature of the body he inhabits declares he 
ought. Mr. Henry George, in answering 
the question " Is our civilization just to 
workingmen ? " draws a picture of the 
homes of the rich and the abodes of the 
poor which will illustrate, in a way he did 
not intend, the point we have in mind. 
" Imagine," he says, " that the first man 
Adam in the slumber of the night stood 
by your bedside in one of those great 
cities which are the flower, crown, and type 
of our civilization, and asked you to take 
him through it. Here you would take him 
through wide and well-kept streets lined 
with spacious mansions, replete with every- 
thing w r hich can enhance comfort and 
gratify taste, adorned with magnificent 
churches. Again, you would pass through 
another quarter where everything is nig- 
gard and pinched, where families are packed 
together tier and tier, sometimes a whole 
family in a single room ; w 7 here even such 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 65 

churches as you see are poor and mean, 
and only the grogshops are gorgeous. 
Which quarter do you think Adam would 
understand you to mean, if you spoke of 
the workingman's quarter ? " Mr. George 
is appealing to the public sense of justice, 
and his appeal is founded upon the argu- 
ment that such a deplorable contrast is 
proof of an inequitable distribution of the 
proceeds of labor. But the appeal chal- 
lenges instantly a reply in terms of polit- 
ical economy. It inaugurates a debate 
which is still in active progress, and mean- 
while the contrast between the Back Bay 
and the Cove, Fifty-seventh Street and 
Avenue B, remains as flagrant as ever, 
so far as any efforts of the debaters have 
mitigated it. But Religion, pushing its 
way through the discussion, has insisted 
that there is another argument which must 
be heard and heeded. " The human 
beings housed in the worst conceivable 
sanitary conditions are our brethren, part 
of the great whole, bone of our bone, flesh 
of our flesh. While you are debating, 
they are dying ; while you are in search of 
an impregnable solution of an economical 



66 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

question, little children are day by day 
drinking in the poison of a foulness of air 
and a degree of almost necessitated filth 
which, working in the blood, will put them 
on the threshold of manhood and woman- 
hood handicapped for life. God never 
meant that man should live as these are 
living. The hollow-eyed, bent, gaunt, 
white-faced woman who emerges from the 
tenement house of an August morning is 
not the type of the woman God meant 
should live upon this earth. Let her be 
bad, fond of beer and tea and snuff — that 
alone is incapable of producing this dis- 
tortion of womanhood. God protests in 
the person of every comely woman against 
conditions which sap the strength and mar 
the beauty of a woman. God is every day 
declaring in the wholesomeness of health, 
and in the pathetic repulsiveness of the 
disease that grows naturally out of poi- 
soned air and reeking walls, that man was 
meant to be as beautiful as the leopard 
and the bird." You see that, after all, it 
is Religion speaking, Religion, which has 
conceived of man as so precious that it 
cannot tolerate the thought of his living 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 67 

in circumstances which, while they cannot 
of themselves degrade him, make his phy- 
sical deterioration inevitable. The move- 
ment in the direction of a better sanitary 
provision for the poor, however non-reli- 
gious here and there it may appear, is at 
heart religious, Christian as well. If legis- 
lation is at length slowly and tentatively 
incorporating into the body of statute law 
provisions for a rigid inspection of our 
tenement houses, prescribing the character 
of the plumbing which the owner must 
provide, testing it when it is in place, 
compelling its repair when defective, that 
argues something more than governmental 
solicitude for the health of those who must 
do the hard work of the nation and the 
town. It declares, rather, that the reli- 
gious conception of the value of a man has 
insinuated itself into public sentiment, and 
that the sense of public duty has uttered 
itself in law. When I hear that sanitary 
reform is the direct outcome of an enlight- 
ened science of the laws of health, and that 
it shows how unnecessary, after all, is the 
Religion which once was the creator of all 
humane reforms, I must still ask whence 



68 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

came the uncalculating force which seized 
upon sanitary science as an instrument, 
and made into fact what before was only 
ascertained knowledge ? Whence came 
the courage, the heroic, persistent, large- 
hearted devotion which, after uncounted 
efforts, succeeded in permeating a public 
sentiment, half ignorant and half indiffer- 
ent, with the acute consciousness that city 
tenements are an outrage upon humanity ? 
Not from a body of sanitary experts, as 
such, not out of a commercial forecast of a 
great new industry, not out of a threatened 
revolt of helpless tenants, but straight out 
of hearts in which lived the great convic- 
tion that man as man was too precious, 
too richly endowed with sensitive powers 
of feeling joy and pain, of rising into self- 
respect and sinking into animalism, to be 
allowed to live in conditions which daily 
threatened to break down the fair struc- 
ture of a body that tenanted a fairer soul. 
Men and women, who perhaps repudiate 
orthodoxy of every sort, have found in 
their devotion to their brother's need the 
surest warrant for believing that deep in 
their hearts was a truer Religion than that 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 69 

illustrated in a scrupulous ritual, and in a 
devotion which may issue in hardness of 
heart. I cannot, and I will not, believe 
that Religion is decaying so long as vigor- 
ous warfare is waged against everything 
which lowers respect for the bodies which 
are temples of the Holy Ghost. The 
preachership which declares the gospel of 
the body is as truly religious as the preach- 
ership which proclaims the gospel of the 
spirit. 

And to that preachership we largely 
owe it that the distortion, " How much is 
a sheep better than a man," has been re- 
stored to its original divine form, " How 
much is a man better than a sheep. " It 
is difficult, nay, it is impossible, not to 
break out into a fervent thanksgiving that, 
in our dear city, one noble-hearted, cour- 
ageous, undaunted woman 1 has made phy- 
sical living far less hopeless and far more 
hopeful for thousands who, but for her 
clear voice, would still be steeped in un- 
mitigated miseries and unspeakable sur- 
roundings. It is not yet clear to us all 
that every effort to make life materially 

1 Mrs. Alice N. Lincoln. 



yo THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

fairer for the unfavored many is an effort 
which only Religion explains and makes 
possible ; but it is growing clearer, and 
when the salvation of man is seen to be 
having all that is best in him at its best, 
organized Religion will proudly claim as 
its own the least of the acts which furnish 
man his chance to become what God in- 
tended him to be. 

And this leads naturally to a considera- 
tion of that feature of modern life here in 
America which is still the object of praise 
and blame. The astonishing increase of 
physical exercise — whether in the form of 
athletics in our colleges, or sports in clubs, 
or drill in the gymnasium — has to many 
minds frequently worn the look of a logical 
consequence of the so-called materialism 
of the day. " Of course," they say, " all 
this was bound to come ; what else should 
follow the decline of spiritual Religion, the 
decay of a reverent belief in the powers 
of the world to come ? This exaltation of 
the body, this rich provision for its devel- 
opment and perfection, is rooted in that 
passionate devotion to things which char- 
acterizes all modern life. Beauty in art, 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. Jl 

luxury in living, sumptuousness in ap- 
pointments, and money as a measure of 
worth, require a perfect body for their per- 
fect enjoyment. The more this life crowds 
out the consideration of the next, the surer 
will be mans effort to secure the only 
vehicle which can carry him safely from 
start to finish of the journey which begins 
at birth and probably ends at death. To 
1 Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we 
die,' has been added, ' Let us exercise and 
develop our bodies, for without their health 
and vigor we perish before we die.' w But 
such a judgment overlooks several consid- 
erations which have to do with Religion. 
Religion, as we have been saying, is intent 
on saving all that is best in man. But it 
has been taught by physiology, and more 
recently by psychology, that while wicked- 
ness is not the outcome of a depraved 
body, a depraved body is the removal of 
many of the most valuable restraints to 
evil impulse, and perhaps the occasion of 
evil impulse itself. It certainly is provo- 
cative of restlessness on the one side, of 
lethargy upon the other ; and the moment 
a man is thoroughly restless or thoroughly 



>]2 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

lethargic, he is open to a set of temp- 
tations to which the normal man is a 
stranger. It is not true, historically or ra- 
tionally, that wickedness is the necessary 
consequent of ill health, but it is true, his- 
torically and rationally, that national phy- 
sical deterioration is followed by national 
moral deterioration, or, if not followed, is 
accompanied by it. The mere perception 
of this fact, however, and its abundant ver- 
ification by both past and present, is pow- 
erless to secure a right treatment of the 
body for the sake of ethical or intellectual 
results in man and nation. What was 
needed, and what is needed still, is the 
profound conviction that man is so rich 
in capacity of development, so intrinsically 
worthy, and so manifestly planned for a 
career that demands the perfection of every 
power, that to ignore his body is to thwart 
God's purpose. The moment a man cries 
out in deep belief, " I have no right to deny 
my body what, as an instrument of mind 
and spirit, it demands ; I have no right, in 
the supposed interest of that mind and 
spirit, to interpret * keeping it under ' as 
permission to let its channels become 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 73 

clogged or foul, its blood to run hot and 
thin ; I have no right to allow it to become 
the hotbed of disordered nerves or the pit 
of narcotized force/' we have a new an- 
thropology, in which the religious signi- 
ficance of physical vitality has its rightful 
recognition. So far, then, from physical 
culture being a sign of decaying spiritual- 
ity, it is rather the as yet unconscious, but 
none the less true, insistence upon the in- 
dubitable fact that ministry to the body is 
as truly an act of Religion as ministry to 
the soul The only reason our boys and 
young men are unable to recognize that 
the drill of the gymnasium is integrally 
one with worship in the chapel, is that 
they have heard the two acts spoken of as 
having no relation to one another, or, if 
not that, have never listened to a frank 
declaration of the fundamental equality of 
them as exercises — " gymnastics," to use 
St. Paul's striking phrase — which have in 
view the symmetrical development of the 
perfect man. But there are not wanting 
signs of an increasing, and increasingly 
intelligent recognition^ by both educators 
and preachers of Religion, that in the near 



74 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

future the training of the child's body must 
keep equal pace with instruction in morals 
and Religion too ; not as a graceful accom- 
plishment merely, not as a physical prepa- 
ration for the hard work of manhood only, 
but as the necessary accompaniment of 
anything like a true development of the na- 
ture which looks up to God for inspiration 
that it may look out on the world w r ith 
sanity and hope. In other words, the pre- 
sent wide interest in physical exercise is 
essentially a religious one, because it rests 
squarely upon our profound conviction 
that to do adequately what we can do, to 
meet faithfully what membership in society 
involves in the way of task and duty, there 
must be a body which, by its vigor and 
strength, can keep our noblest purposes 
from degenerating into feeble good wishes. 
That is the religious basis of physical ex- 
ercises. And it is characteristic of our 
time that it has lifted, or that it is trying 
to lift, the passion for the body's develop- 
ment clean out of the idea of it as valua- 
ble mainly for making a nation of vigorous 
soldiers and muscular toilers, and is setting 
it forth as an integral part of the ideal 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 75 

of the perfect man. It is corroborative of 
this view of it that when physical exercise 
secured recognition as a necessary part of 
education, when provision was made for it 
in our schools and colleges in the same 
way that provision had been made for in- 
struction in chemistry and for worship in 
the chapel, there was at once discrimina- 
tion between physical culture and competi- 
tive sports. Competitive contests are to 
the development of the body what a ritual 
is to Religion. A ritual is forever in danger 
of sinking into superstition. It can perpet- 
uate itself in safety only as it scrupulously 
regards itself as the vehicle of a devotion 
which is perpetually strengthened and illu- 
minated by personal loyalty to God. The 
moment ritual ceases to regard itself as 
vehicle, and decorates and prolongs itself 
regardless of its sole function, it becomes 
a superstition. So competitive sport is, 
ideally, the exhibition of the progress and 
achievement of physical training ; it is the 
disclosure to the public of the results, in 
power of sustained exertion, endurance, 
grace and nerve, of a systematic and in- 
telligent corporal development. The mo- 



7 6 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

ment it loses sight of its true relation to 
the education of the whole man, it sinks 
to the level of the uncontrollable frenzy of 
the bull-dog, the blind tenacity of the Tas- 
manian devil. It ought to be clear that 
there is no permanent cure for the brutal- 
ity and ferocity which have too frequently 
attended athletic contests, nor for the in- 
consequential, but none the less deplora- 
ble features of some of them, in marshal- 
ing arguments to prove that brutality is no 
true element of a trial of physical strength, 
endurance, and skill; it will be found in 
the powerful and continuous insistence 
that physical exercise is not for the sake 
of athletic competition, but for the produc- 
tion of a body meet for all the demands 
which the serious business of life shall 
make upon it, and for the creation of the 
healthy nerve and normal brain, fed by 
pure cool blood, which furnish noblest pur- 
poses for the conduct of life with their 
finest chance. The new anthropology, by 
insisting upon the sacredness of the body 
as the instrument of the mind, and upon 
the mind as the servant of the spirit, and, 
further, by declaring that the salvation of 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY, JJ 

each is essential to that salvation of the 
total man for which Religion exists, will 
soonest and surest elevate physical culture 
to its rightful place in the economy of edu- 
cation, soonest and surest preserve it from 
the danger of degenerating into sheer ani- 
malism, — the possession of a magnificent 
physique pledged to nothing better than 
service to physical sensations. Over all 
this apparently non-religious outbreak of 
a passionate devotion to the gospel of the 
body broods the spirit of man's religious 
faith in himself as intrinsically precious 
because allied by indestructible bonds to 
the God from whom he came, with Whom 
he lives, to Whom he shall one day return. 
That devotion can never sink utterly down 
into materialism, however refined and 
beautiful, so long as Religion, uttering her- 
self anew in this more spiritual anthro- 
pology, more and more illuminates the 
blind play of human physical force, and 
shows to it the real meaning and purpose 
of its energy. To regard it as the indubi- 
table symptom of an increasingly robust 
materialism, or the mark of a decay of Reli- 
gion, is flagrantly to misinterpret it ; it is, 



78 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

rather, Religion asserting herself in fields 
on which it has been supposed she had no 
business, no duties, and no rights. It is 
the working of an instinct fundamental 
and unerring. We can misinterpret it, 
have misinterpreted it; but it is well to re- 
member that acute saying of Mr. Arnold, 
" A man's instinct is always truer than his 
interpretation of it." But the coming years 
'will, I think, witness two significant events: 
first, the permanent and ample provision 
for physical culture as part of the educa- 
tion which the state provides for all her 
children ; and, second, the frank, glad rec- 
ognition that this provision is the outcome 
of an intelligent religious purpose to have 
all that is best in a man at its best, which 
is the salvation for which Religion exists. 

Again, the relation of the new anthro- 
pology to the use of Sunday must not 
be ignored. It has been said that New 
England Puritanism is modern Levitical 
Judaism, and that the conception of the 
meaning of Sunday which Puritanism illus- 
trated was taken unaltered from discredited 
pre-Christian Jewish sources. The pre- 
sent use of Sunday is widely regarded as a 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 79 

revolt against ancient Sabbatarianism, and 
equally a revolt against Religion as a force 
regulating both belief and conduct. It 
would be far truer to interpret the modern 
Sunday as a return to what was most char- 
acteristic in the Levitical doctrine of the 
Sabbath, and a fulfillment of what is im- 
plied in the Christian doctrine of Sunday. 
Levitical legislation was bent on securing 
a cessation of toil on the Sabbath. It pro- 
tested against continuous labor, insisted 
upon the necessity of rest. The Fourth 
Commandment legislates not against re- 
creation nor amusement, but against toil. 
It is the only Commandment of the ten 
which defines with exactness what it en- 
joins. "Remember the Sabbath day to 
keep it holy." But what was the holiness 
so rigidly commanded ? Was there not 
the chance of misconceiving or misinter- 
preting it ? The Commandment, there- 
fore, was expanded into an explicit defini- 
tion of what " keeping the Sabbath day 
holy " really meant. By it there is an ab- 
solute prohibition laid upon all sorts of 
work by every sort of people. Sabbath 
breaking was thus identified with toil on 



80 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

the Sabbath day. When young Nehemiah 
wished to picture graphically the desecra- 
tion of his nation's holy day, he cried, " I 
saw people treading winepresses, binding 
sheaves, and lading asses. I heard the fish 
dealers of Tyre crying their wares in the 
streets and selling to the inhabitants of 
Jerusalem and the men of Judah." Work, 
the prosecution of any calling that involved 
it for ones self or for other people — man- 
servant or maidservant, even for ox or for 
ass — was the real breach of the holiness 
of the Sabbath day. And all the legisla- 
tion which undertook to express in statutes 
what was necessary to safeguard the ele- 
mental principle, conforms to the purpose 
of that principle. The scrupulous obser- 
vance of the Sabbath was to be a sign 
between God and Israel that Israel might 
know that, through strict obedience to the 
Sabbath law, Jehovah " sanctified " them, 
.that is, kept them whole, safe from the 
mutilation which continuous toil has ever 
caused. It is utterly to mistake the mean- 
ing of that still powerful, still beneficent 
institution to regard it as an exasperating 
restriction laid upon the happiness and 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY, 8 1 

freedom of man. The true Fourth Com- 
mandment has ever been a bulwark against 
the ignorant, or the sordid, or the ava- 
ricious spirit which would rob man of his 
well-earned rest. The Hebrew doctrine 
of the Sabbath, when it is philosophically 
and historically appreciated, will be seen 
to be the elemental truth of which the 
larger and more joyous freedom of our 
later day is the expansion, just as the sani- 
tary precautions, which modern bacterio- 
logy is everywhere crying up, are the lineal 
descendants of those ceremonial purifica- 
tions in which the Books of Leviticus and 
Deuteronomy abound ; for the correlatives 
of sterilization, antiseptics, and medical 
lustrations are bountifully to be found in 
those old Scriptures, the sanitary wisdom 
of which is more and more accepted as 
modern science itself becomes thoroughly 
enlightened. Our modern Sunday, with 
its emphasis upon recreation, so far from 
being a revolt against Sabbatarianism is 
demonstrably a return to it, — a return led 
by that expansion of Religion which has 
taught us to look through custom, tradi- 
tion, and statute into the heart of the great 



82 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

fundamental principle of the need of phy- 
sical rest, of which many customs, tradi- 
tions, and statutes are the distorted report. 
Of the religious institution of the Sabbath 
there can be no doubt. Of the real purpose 
of that Sabbath there can be no doubt. 
And of the true significance of the emanci- 
pation of our modern Sunday from gloom, 
depression, and an irrational prohibition of 
recreation, there ought to be no doubt. It 
is the product of the new anthropology, 
which itself is the distinct creation of that 
expansion of Religion which sees in man 
a creature too precious to be disfigured by 
continuous toil, and disheartened by lack 
of recreation. Sunday is the great rest 
day. It is kept sanely — that is kept 
"holy" — when it joyously and gratefully 
is used as the clement, periodic suspension 
of the primary universal law of human life 
upon this globe, " In the sweat of thy face 
shalt thou eat bread." With all its stupid, 
irrational, frivolous, lamentable, and blame- 
worthy features, exhibited through all the 
year, it is still a distinct religious gain that 
our Sunday is not the Sunday of a cen- 
tury, nay, half a century, ago. For we 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 83 

have come at last to perceive that if it is 
to be a day of rest, it cannot be spent as a 
day of the repression of everything except 
that activity which takes the form of pub- 
lic worship. Doing nothing is not rest, it 
is indolence. Rest is activity in recreation. 
We have, therefore, opened the doors of 
museum and library, that the weary thou- 
sands may enter in and bathe their tired 
spirits in the cool fountains of beauty and 
knowledge. We have deliberately enlarged 
the number of permitted pleasures because 
we have intelligently concluded that what- 
ever ministers to the physical betterment 
of man is a legitimate ministry to his soul 
as well, for it is providing him with one 
more chance to live as God intended he 
should when He lodged his soul in a body 
and declared, in the physical law which 
governs the body and in the spiritual law 
which directs his spirit, what the life of a 
man should be. Perhaps a clergyman is 
peculiarly fitted to observe the effect of 
Sunday emancipation upon the general 
religious public habit of the people as that 
habit is seen in attachment to organized 
Religion. Disuse of public worship is, I 



84 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

think, more general than it was a quarter 
of a century ago. Abstention from it is 
also more respected and expected now than 
then. Not only does the great body of the 
people find in a multitude of provisions 
for their entertainment and recreation an 
attraction more powerful than that of the 
Church, but the favored few are accepting 
Sunday as the natural, as it is the conven- 
ient, time for retreat to the country, which 
offers to the reawakened urban mind op- 
portunities for delight and healthy excite- 
ment undreamed of a score of years ago. 
A Sunday in the country as guest or host, 
a Sunday in the country as pedestrian or 
wheelman, is now the winsome promise to 
thousands whose weekday lives are bounded 
by shop and factory and office, and to 
hundreds who are under the tyrannous en- 
gagements of a complex and conventional 
social life. Public worship suffers, — the 
regularity of church attendance is broken, 
becomes fitful, frequently ceases altogether; 
a yawning gulf of emptiness in many a 
church, urban, suburban, country, stretches 
from the middle of June to the middle of 
September. A period of " masterly inac- 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 85 

tivity " in nearly all forms of enterprising 
religious endeavor ensues. The centri- 
petal force which, like a magnetic influ- 
ence, draws thousands to the city in the 
winter is transformed into the centrifugal 
force which sends them out again on Sun- 
days to green fields and the cool fringes 
of the sea, singing, with altered meaning, 
" Welcome, sweet day of rest." It will 
not be claimed that thus far the people 
have been entirely successful in the use of 
their new freedom. They use it clumsily, 
vulgarly, mistakenly, — counteracting the 
blessings of air and exercise by the curse 
of drink, excitement, and irrational exer- 
tion. As yet they are experimenting, and 
already have paid heavy bills in disordered 
nerves and exhausted bodies. Superfi- 
cially viewed, the American Sunday is not 
pleasant. It is too heated, too boisterous, 
too exhausting. It lacks that calm, deep 
content, that easy self-restraint, that skill 
in seizing what is most refining and stimu- 
lating, which we rightly associate with 
symmetrical, full-rounded life. And one 
can understand how there still survive 
those who sincerely and reflectingly believe 



86 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

that the old Sunday, with its decorous, 
serious, earnest behavior, its faithful use 
of the church, and its strenuous endeavor 
to see in all that is done in this world only 
a preparation for the next, is preferable 
to this noisy, churchless, material Sunday 
which we have come to know so well. But 
costly excess and misdirected energy are 
characteristic of emancipation. We are 
experimenting. Physical recreation, sen- 
suous amusement, are overlaying that deep 
sense of the necessity of sensitiveness of 
conscience and responsiveness to awe, 
which lives in us all because the conscience 
is constitutionally a faculty of human na- 
ture, and awe is native to a child of God. 
We are experimenting. Disuse of the 
Church, which stands in the community for 
morality and compassion, for the creation, 
maintenance, and direction of those power- 
ful currents which run through all asso- 
ciated life to keep it pure and true, seems 
now, at least, to be unattended by serious 
loss of moral force in communities and 
men. But in a near future, men will ask 
whether there has not resulted a serious 
deterioration in character from an unre- 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 87 

strained freedom to use Sunday as the 
most acute impulse may suggest. Such a 
deterioration is bound to follow. But let 
it be clearly seen that reformation is not 
to come by way of the old custom, nor by 
a curtailment of recreation. It is to come 
by a serious awakening to the fact — which 
even now is evident to many a champion 
of the freer Sunday — that unless along 
with physical recreation and social plea- 
sure go ministries to the conscience and 
the spirit, to reverence for God and belief 
in Heaven as the justification of earth, 
physical culture will produce only splendid 
animals, and social energy degenerate into 
empty-headed frivolity. The modern Sun- 
day is imperfect. But its imperfectness is 
not due to a misconception of the signifi- 
cance of recreation, but to a miscalculation 
of the relation of recreation to the invigor- 
ation of the conscience, and to the educa- 
tion of that ineradicable though slumber- 
ing sense of the nearness of God which 
sets off man from brutedom. That im- 
perfectness will not be corrected by pro- 
hibiting recreation, but by restraining its 
present excess. And that restraint will 



88 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

best and surest be improved by leading 
men, gently and persuasively, into that 
larger conception of what it is truly to live, 
which includes the worship of God. The 
doors of the museum and library will never 
be closed on Sundays, the fields and the 
sea will not cease calling weary men and 
women to come to them for refreshment, 
— and no man sensitive to the conditions 
of toil which will forever be the lot of our 
humanity would wish it, — but the doors 
of the Church must stand wide open too, 
that the spirit may find its recreation and 
refreshment in prayers and praise. For 
years to come, it may be, the Church is to 
suffer loss, but not forever. The great 
human instinct of worship will draw back 
into a better instructed, into a more enlight- 
ened House of God those who can now 
turn away from it, to find in physical activ- 
ity and acute sensations what hits the pre- 
sent mood. To-day's treatment of Sunday 
is not final. The very fact that what it is 
to-day, in larger freedom from ancient and 
venerated restraints, is due to Religion, is 
ample warrant for believing that Religion 
is competent to recast Sunday into a day 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY, 89 

in which the culture of the spirit is recog- 
nized as so vitally an accompaniment of 
the culture of the body, that the worship 
of God in the temple will be all of a piece 
with the education of the mind in museum 
or library, and the invigoration of the 
physical organism in the field or on the 
river. At any rate, we ought to be clear 
as to this : that if blame for the disappear- 
ance of the old Sunday of our fathers is to 
be laid at any door, it is at the door of 
Religion, the Religion which has taught 
us the preciousness of the body, soul, and 
mind of man, the Religion which has stood 
for Sunday as the great rest day, the Reli- 
gion which proclaims that rest is not idle- 
ness, and, finally, the Religion which de- 
clares that, since our bodies are the temple 
of the Holy Ghost, no man can with guilt- 
lessness defile that temple, and whoso doth 
defile it, him shall God destroy. 

It is this new anthropology, also, which 
has set sickness in a new light. When 
Jesus healed the paralytic at the pool, He 
dismissed him with the searching warning, 
" Sin no more, lest a worse thing come 
upon thee." It is a declaration that disease 



90 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

is frequently the outward and visible sign 
of sin. That is one of the commonplaces 
of theology. But its common interpreta- 
tion has been that sickness is a sign of 
sin only when the disease is casually or 
visibly connected with a particular act. 
The ship captain w r ho smoked himself 
stone blind and reached port only to die, 
the hardy sot who drank three pints of 
whiskey at a sitting and found himself 
paralyzed for life, these preeminently were 
ill men whose disease visibly proceeded 
out of their sin. But when the unnoticed, 
prodigal expenditures of vitality, or the 
unnoticed, persistent disregard of the laws 
of the physical organism resulted in lan- 
guor or decay or disease, men were pitied, 
not blamed. Indeed, within the memory 
of living men it was regarded as something 
to be apologized for if a member of one of 
the learned professions betrayed athletic 
strength. Luther, with his robust vigor, 
might have been cast into the shade by 
pale Philip Melancthon in one of our par- 
ishes half a century ago. There are ill- 
nesses of which men ought to be thor- 
oughly ashamed, for which they ought not 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 91 

to seek a cause in the " mysterious dispen- 
sation of Providence," and which they 
ought to have the manliness and honesty 
to confess are the result of deplorable, 
despicable, and deliberate wrong -doing. 
The pride of health and vigor must forever 
be recognized as justifying shame when 
health is broken and vigor falls into decay 
long before age has "darkened the win- 
dows" and compelled "the keepers of the 
house to tremble." I knew nothing more 
hopeful in the sentiment of young men 
touching the whole question of athletics 
than their clear perception and their frank 
declaration that ill health in a young man 
who starts out with no hereditary or con- 
stitutional weakness is a disgrace, and not 
a misfortune. It is a recognition, con- 
scious or unconscious, that their health is 
in their own keeping, like their manners 
and their morals. When physical exercise 
was made a compulsory part of education 
at Amherst thirty years ago, ranking in 
importance with the study of Greek and 
mathematics, it was, and was intended to 
be, a bold denial of the opinion that a 
student's health was at the mercy of Divine 



92 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

Providence, an assertion of the truth that 
health is in part a religious achievement. 
Not to train athletes, but to create health, 
not to develop the skill which delights in 
feats, but to secure to vitality that protec- 
tion which is owed to the body by its 
possessor, was that experiment in educa- 
tion made in a preeminently religious col- 
lege. The result has amply demonstrated 
its wisdom. And the adoption of similar 
systems elsewhere has resulted in incal- 
culable good, not alone in raising the 
standard of physical vigor, but in creating 
and spreading the belief that for most 
young men sickness is a disgrace. It is 
the new anthropology declaring itself in a 
new field, the gospel of the body and the 
gospel of Jesus working together to pro- 
duce the perfect man. " Conviction of 
sin," upon which evangelicalism laid great 
stress, so far from disappearing in the 
so-called materialistic spirit of our day, 
receives a new definition and a new em- 
phasis in that expansion of Religion which 
now includes physical health as an object 
of its care and prayer. And we shall 
never appreciate the meaning of all our 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 93 

provision for the production and main- 
tenance of public health until we see in all 
its least arrangements the utterance of the 
Christian spirit. 

I think I have shown that the care of 
the sick, the application of sanitary science 
to the conditions of living, the growth of 
interest in physical exercise, the transfor- 
mation of Sunday and the estimate put 
upon the spiritual significance of health 
and sickness, are the direct result of what 
I have called the new anthropology. And 
the new anthropology is not the child of 
social economy, nor of that vulgar mate- 
rialism which knows nothing beside the 
earth with its power to furnish delights 
and to evolve pains, nor of the reasoned 
purpose to secure the acutest sensations 
with least loss of force to repeat them; it 
is distinctly the work of Religion seeking 
the salvation of man, and counting that 
salvation incomplete unless man has all 
his chances fixedly secure, and all his 
chances turned into the concrete facts of 
vitality and health. 

When one looks back fifty years and 
contrasts the nature of the effort Religion 



94 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

made to save man with the passionate 
efforts she is making now, he cannot think 
that Religion has decayed ; he must find, 
rather, in the character and extent of her 
enterprises for the betterment of the con- 
ditions under which life must be lived, in 
the firm recognition of the physical side 
of life as at least equal to that of the 
spiritual, and in the declaration that the 
two belong to each other, the indubitable 
proof that Religion is more live, more in 
earnest, more enlightened, more sagacious, 
and, finally, more fruitful, than it has ever 
been. Organized Religion but imper- 
fectly records the achievements of Religion 
itself. It never has presented — possibly 
never may present — the perfect picture of 
man steadily rising in the scale of worth. 
In France, for example, where renuncia- 
tion and devotion are thoroughly organ- 
ized, it is possible to estimate the achieve- 
ments of Religion by taking the statistics 
of institutional enterprise. Goodness in 
France is largely vicarious, if we mean by 
goodness the maintenance of good works 
by organized Religion. The Sister of 
Charity is in evidence everywhere, and the 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 95 

Church absorbs into itself pretty much all 
of religious activity there is, sending it out 
again impressed with the seal of ecclesias- 
ticism. But in America Religion is every- 
where — almost as much of it outside as 
inside the churches — independent of visi- 
ble means of spiritual support, yet always 
eager to do what Religion lives to accom- 
plish. And in the last quarter of a century 
it has perhaps in nothing so powerfully 
and beneficently declared its presence as 
in the widespread eagerness it has shown 
to create right physical conditions of liv- 
ing, and in the evident fact that this eager- 
ness is born of a profounder belief in the 
preciousness of man. 

One hundred and fifty years ago, a New 
England Puritan officer in the Colonial 
army set down in his diary an account of 
an incident in the French and Indian 
wars: "Killed the Chief indian, a Saga- 
more from the Island of St. Johns, which 
are known by the name Mickmack. He 
lived about five hours after he was shott, 
and behaved as bold as any man could till 
he died, but wanted Rum and Sider which 
we gave him till he died. He was shott 



96 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

through the bodey just below his ribs. 
He measured six feet two inches, and very 
large boned, but very poor." Is this the 
description of man or brute ? Yet how 
agreeable it is to the stern anthropology 
of that elder day. 

In Hindoo catechisms we read, "What 
is cruel ? The heart of a viper. What is 
more cruel than that? The heart of a 
woman. What is the chief gate to hell ? 
A woman. What are fetters to men? 
Women. What is that which cannot be 
trusted? Women. What poison is that 
which appears like nectar? Women. 
Woman is a great whirlpool of suspicion, 
a dwelling-place of vices, full of deceits, a 
hindrance in the way of heaven, the gate 
of hell ! " That is the Hindoo anthro- 
pology. The Hindoo treatment of women 
and widows, of which America has heard 
so painfully in recent years, is the natural 
outcome of that anthropology. Place 
Ramabai's description of the condition of 
her sisters by the side of what we know of 
widowhood as honored by Religion, place 
the Puritan's description of the dying In- 
dian by the side of Bishop Whipple's story 



THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 97 

of his life among the red men of Minne- 
sota, or Herbert Welsh's reports to gov- 
ernment, and then ask whether the new 
anthropology measures a Religion con- 
tracting or expanding, decaying or waxing 
strong, among the children of men. The 
question, What is man? can be adequately 
answered only in terms of Religion. 



III. 

RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

Religion makes more stir in the world 
as a theology and as an ecclesiasticism 
than as a visible moral force, working 
through theology and ecclesiasticism, — 
makes more stir, attracts more public at- 
tention, and writes a more dramatic, not 
to say theatric history. The councils, the 
controversies, the heresies and schisms, 
the promulgation of edicts, confessions, 
catechisms, and articles, — these make up 
so large a portion of the great story of 
organized Religion that it is not strange 
that we should think of these as the chief 
indications, not only of her existence, but 
of her purpose and influence. When Pro- 
fessor Draper wrote his interesting and 
vivacious book on the " Conflict of Reli- 
gion and Science," Religion, to his think- 
ing, was altogether an ecclesiasticism, and 
he consequently found no difficulty in 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 99 

abundantly illustrating the evil effect of 
Religion upon the enterprises of science. 
But the quick oblivion into which that 
book, and scores like it, fell is grateful 
evidence that to the reflection of the peo- 
ple Religion is vastly more than its theo- 
logy and ecclesiasticism. When a great 
clergyman said, some years ago, " I have 
written about six hundred sermons, and I 
thank God none of them deals with the 
reconciliation of Religion and science," 
there were speedily found those who criti- 
cised him for a failure to do his duty at a 
time when Religion and science were in 
sore need of reconciliation in the interest 
of them both. But clearer and wiser 
minds saw in that statement the declara- 
tion that Religion and science have never 
needed any reconciliation and never will, 
because each of them is in search of truth, 
and that just in proportion as each of 
them finds her they will be in agreement. 
Religion can make mistakes, science can 
err ; and when the mistakes of the one and 
the errors of the other meet together and 
clash, it is not a meeting of Religion and 
science, but of untruths or half truths. 



100 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

That this is true is amply shown by the 
changed attitudes toward each other of 
organized Religion and that which we 
loosely call science, in the last twenty 
years. Organized Religion has markedly 
receded from many a position of open and 
sometimes bitter opposition to the dis- 
coveries and theories of men of science. 
But that recession has been an intelligent 
one, it has not been sentimental. Organ- 
ized Religion has been slow to accept the 
results of experiment and the conclusions 
drawn from them, but its leisurely action 
is due to a wholesome caution. It has 
had the wit to perceive that not every 
proclaimed discovery of truth is real, not 
every inference is sound. It has for the 
most part patiently awaited the verifica- 
tion of the many startling announcements 
of critical facts, frequently acknowledged 
its mistakes, and hastened to incorporate 
into its interpretation of its doctrines the 
new truth finally established. Nor can it 
be denied that it has learned the lesson 
of patient, expectant silence. It no longer 
breaks forth into violent denunciation 
of the utterances of scholars and men of 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 101 

science. It has at last perceived that what 
at first sight wears the look of enmity, on 
closer inspection may prove friend and 
ally. It can afford to wait in silent hope, 
confident that its fundamental doctrines 
will receive no harm from anything which 
the labor of man discovers in any field of 
investigation. The frequently urged claim 
that this altered habit of organized Reli- 
gion is the child of a less confident belief 
in her long cherished truths, is founded 
upon nothing more substantial than a mis- 
interpretation of her disciplined convic- 
tion that all truth is one. Her hold upon 
her peculiar truth is not slackened ; she 
has simply opened her doors, with a bolder 
confidence, to receive what comes to her 
claiming to be truth, ready to listen im- 
partially, yet ever cautiously and carefully, 
to what the new truth can say for itself. 
This, too, is an expansion of Religion, not 
in the direction of dogma, but of a more 
spiritual confidence in the impregnable 
nature of the fundamental truth of which 
Religion is the expression. 

The hypothesis of evolution may or 
may not prove true, but the attitude of 



102 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

organized Religion towards it to-day, in 
contrast with the frightened, panicky con- 
demnation both of it and those who urged 
it, a quarter of a century ago, is grateful 
evidence that Religion has grown calm, 
has regained confidence in herself as in 
no danger from the new interpretation of 
herself which evolutionary theories may 
require, or have already effected. 

But, on the other hand, the spirit and 
temper of science have changed more radi- 
cally, even, than those of organized Reli- 
gion. For Religion has acquired a new 
interest, and consequently a new impor- 
tance, in the thinking of men of science. 
It is not too much to say that Religion is 
frankly recognized as the formulation of a 
force just as real and just as persistent as 
that of which gravitation is the scientific 
name. Man is as much a part of the uni- 
verse as a star. If it is worth while to 
determine the nature of the star's sub- 
stance by the spectrum analysis, and thence 
to declare its similarity to the material of 
which our earth is composed, it is equally 
worth while to determine the nature of the 
spiritual forces which declare what man 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 103 

has done and is doing, what he has been 
and what he is likely at last to be. The 
high doctrine of to-day is that the world 
was made for man, not man for the world. 
Consequently what man is, is seen to be 
of more importance than anything belong- 
ing to the w r orld in which he lives. He 
has many marks of identification: he is 
a poet, musician, artist, politician, adven- 
turer, inventor ; he is a thinker, statesman, 
soldier, by turns; but he is always and 
everywhere religious. He ceases to be 
enterprising now and then along all lines 
save that of Religion. It is the recogni- 
tion of this fact, more than of any other, 
which explains the otherwise puzzling fea- 
ture of our latest scientific activity, — its 
growing interest in Religion while push- 
ing its investigations into the phenomena 
of the material world with unabated vigor, 
with undiminished brilliancy of result. 
Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to affirm 
that Religion, as distinguished from theo- 
logy and ecclesiasticism, is as much an 
object of serious and intelligent interest to 
men of science as to men of Religion. Its 
persistence, its power of revival, its skill 



104 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

in adapting itself to altered conditions 
of thought, its sturdy appearances as the 
great moral force of humanity in crises 
when morality is absolutely essential to the 
preservation of public order and the main- 
tenance of public justice, its perpetual 
demonstration of itself as the visible sup- 
ply of all those motives which influence 
men to stand by righteousness, personal 
and national, the proved inability of hu- 
manity to supplant it by any system which 
does not root itself in the divine, — all this, 
and much more, has made Religion of 
first importance to the scientific spirit of 
our day. Secondary causes are now rec- 
ognized as secondary causes, as much in 
need of explanation themselves as that 
which they explain. After their long mis- 
understanding of one another, and conse- 
quently their bitter hostility to each other, 
Religion and science are now sitting down 
as friends, ready to learn what each has to 
teach, and convinced that the outcome of 
their conference will be a compact to help 
one another to the uttermost. 

Now, one of the points which is clearer 
to-day than ever, because of this better un- 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 105 

derstanding which I have tried to describe, 
is this : that Religion and science equally 
perceive that the outcome of faith and 
knowledge should be righteousness. Reli- 
gion says : " Faith, unless it translate itself 
into righteousness, is dead ; " and science 
declares " that knowledge, if it cannot in- 
corporate itself in righteousness, is no true 
contribution to the welfare of mankind." 
And Religion, having thus compelled 
science to go a mile, is now endeavoring 
to compel her to go twain, and to see in 
Religion the power that is forever using 
fresh knowledge to create more righteous- 
ness. But, first of all, Religion had to be 
expanded into a larger conception of what 
righteousness for man really involved. We 
tried to trace that expansion in the last 
lecture, which dealt with the new anthro- 
pology. You will perhaps recall that when 
the preciousness and value of a human life 
became a reason for furnishing a ministry 
to all of man that can be ministered to, 
Religion seized upon all the knowledge of 
whatever sort science had obtained and 
used it as material for the construction of 
human welfare. Religion, in other words, 



106 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

enlarged itself to receive the help which 
science furnished in the form of know- 
ledge. And now science is enlarging itself 
to receive from Religion the help which 
Religion furnishes in the form of motives 
derived from a divine source. I do not 
assert that as yet there is the perfect un- 
derstanding which conditions the perfect 
success, but I do assert that the movement 
of both science and Religion is distinctly 
in the direction of a compact whereby each 
shall gladly furnish the other with what 
shall produce the individual and social 
righteousness which is now seen to be the 
inexorable condition of human progress. 

The first result of this better under- 
standing of one another and of this expan- 
sion of the field of each, is the clear recog- 
nition that righteousness has an economic 
value. But that economic value was un- 
derrated when Religion conceived herself 
as concerned mainly with man's correct 
understanding of her theological doctrines, 
with his spiritual preparation for life in 
the world to come, together with his satis- 
factory ecclesiastical behavior in this. The 
incorporation of the economic value of 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 107 

righteousness into the estimate put upon 
its spiritual value is one of the most 
marked features of our time. But it is 
indisputably the outcome of an expanded 
Religion. We accept it as a religious 
achievement, not as an indication of ma- 
terialistic conversion. That is to say, 
thanks to Religion, which has for its prime 
endeavor the production of righteousness, 
an economic value is set upon godliness. 
It is worth as much as the Fire Depart- 
ment, the Public School system, the Police, 
or Insurance, in the total life of the peo- 
ple. It is no longer regarded as some- 
thing from which we derive spiritual bless- 
ing alone, the fullness and value of which 
shall be disclosed only when we enter 
the New Jerusalem ; but out of it, here 
and now, flow material blessings to the 
community and the individual. They who 
administer the government, in its many 
branches, are inexorably dependent for a 
successful administration upon the amount 
and quality of righteousness active in the 
community. And they who frame laws 
for the government to execute are com- 
pelled to reckon with the spiritual vitality 



108 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

of those for whom the laws are enacted. 
A thoroughly wise statute frequently be- 
comes inoperative because there is not 
enough concrete righteousness in the peo- 
ple to bear it; and on the other hand, 
a bad statute becomes void if the public 
conscience and the public moral habit 
resist it, on the score of its inadequacy 
or injustice. All government is, finally, 
the expression of the spiritual will of the 
governed. The people's whim, frenzy, or 
selfishness, and the people's will and moral 
quality, are alike, but not equally, powerful 
in shaping legislation and in enforcing law. 
Righteousness, therefore, so far from being 
a merely personal quality, limited in its 
consequences to the contracted circle in 
which the individual moves, is that great 
pervasive element in the total life of the 
people from which spring, and in which 
thrive, all our public virtues and our ma- 
terial prosperity as well. It is not merely 
the light which lightens the mechanic's 
bench or the pages of the student's book, 
it is the sunlight which floods the city and 
conditions the efficiency, the safety, the 
prosperity, of all its myriad men. To 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 109 

think of righteousness as no more than a 
beautiful and useful quality of those who 
put themselves under the guidance of God 
that they may gain and keep it, the reward 
of which is jealously reserved in heaven, is 
to miss its true glory, and no less its im- 
mediate and solid worth. 

One of the most alarming and discour- 
aging features of modern municipal admin- 
istration is its enormous cost. The crimi- 
nals of any great city lay upon it a burden 
of expense equal to that of maintaining the 
public education of all the children in its 
schools, if all the people w T ho are in its 
hospitals, asylums, and workhouses, as the 
direct or indirect result of their wrong- 
doing, are added to the number confined 
in its jails. The statistics which the city 
publishes for the information of her citi- 
zens are appalling, if we turn only to those 
pages which record the cost of detecting, 
trying, and punishing criminals, the cost of 
maintaining those whose vices have landed 
them in disease, poverty, and helplessness, 
the cost of repairing the damages caused 
by criminal incompetence, jobbery, and 
waste. It all makes a huge item in the 



110 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

yearly budget, and we have heretofore 
regarded that item as a yearly necessity, 
because somehow we had regarded the 
unrighteousness which created the charges 
for which the item provides, as an inevita- 
ble feature of the city's life. We reasoned 
about it in this way, if we reasoned about 
it at all : " The provision for taking muni- 
cipal notice of committed crime, and for 
caring for the consequences of that crime, 
must be cheerfully, amply made, because 
the government is powerless to quench the 
fountains whence perpetually flow the evil 
influences which make the crimes and 
criminals that disturb our peace and cost 
us dear, so much as possible. The gov- 
ernment has power to appropriate money 
to improve the sanitary condition of the 
city jail ; it has no power to bestow a penny 
upon the Boys' Club which seeks, and 
seeks successfully, to train boys in those 
qualities which keep them out of jail. The 
government can create the park through 
which may roam all through summer-time 
her troops of children and her hard-worked 
men; it cannot erect a single decent 
tenement house in her most pestiferous 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. Ill 

quarter, in which men, women, and chil- 
dren may enjoy the simplest conditions 
of the wholesome physical life which so 
powerfully affects all moral life. The city 
is compelled to say, ' If you steal and cheat, 
if you murder or burn, if you are drunk or 
disorderly, I will put you in my jail and 
feed you there at the public expense ; if 
you ruin your health by your vices, if you 
sink down into pauperism and trampdom 
by your improvidence and evil living, I will 
receive you into my hospitals, giving you 
the best medical treatment, or into my 
workhouses, clothing and feeding you at 
the public expense ; but I cannot spend 
money in any large or direct way to set up 
the machinery of righteousness to keep 
you back from the criminal spirit, and to 
foster in you the love of struggle, the hab- 
its of right living, and the principles of 
thrift. And every year I must take from 
the pockets of the industrious, sober, 
thrifty, and well-behaved, a sum of money 
large enough to defray the enormous cost 
of your wickedness, shiftlessness, and self- 
inflicted disease.' That is what the poor 
perplexed city is compelled to say as she 



112 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

stands to-day sadly looking at the ma- 
chinery for producing wickedness and dis- 
ease and pauperism which revolves in the 
midst of her ceaselessly every day. So far 
as she is a government, that is the only 
utterance she can make, until government 
is something other than we have thus far 
agreed that it shall be." But could there 
be a stronger argument made in behalf of 
righteousness than is presented by even a 
superficial study of the expenditures of our 
municipalities ? Could there be a severer 
arraignment of wickedness framed than is 
already at hand in these amazing figures 
which tell us how much unrighteousness 
costs us every year ? Religion to-day is 
declaring that she has a right to ask the 
people to reflect upon the disastrous con- 
sequences to political, industrial, commer- 
cial, and social welfare, of the wickedness 
which heretofore she has mourned over 
mainly because it was disobedience to 
God and the spiritual ruin of souls. She 
has found a new weapon for use in her 
warfare against sin, and a new argument 
in her debate with those who have re- 
garded her as ministering to a wish for no- 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 113 

thing nearer or surer than a far-off heaven. 
Unrighteousness is waste, — waste of men, 
w r aste of material, waste of energy, waste 
of the public trust. Unrighteousness is 
a spendthrift, scattering the earnings of 
health, of industry, of enterprise, and self- 
denial. It is like a mob of idle loafers 
insolently living upon labor of the toiler. 
This has always been true in fact, but 
the relation of wickedness to municipal 
expense has been set forth vividly only 
in modern times, and Religion is the first 
to cry aloud in the ears of men who have 
underrated her, that righteousness is as 
necessary to the welfare of the city as 
its aqueducts and sewers, its schools and 
parks, its firemen and judges. She is 
telling the people, as never before, that 
it is idle to expand commerce and foster 
trade, idle to enlarge the city's borders 
and to increase its wealth, unless there be 
growing, with the city's growth, a deep, 
strong, intelligent hold upon that right- 
eousness of conduct and of life, which 
God, without consulting us, has made the 
inflexible condition of prosperity. Gov- 
ernment as government has been cease- 



114 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

lessly at work upon statutes, and methods 
of stringently enforcing them; has, with 
marvelous ingenuity and infinite patience, 
toiled on for the welfare of the people, 
hoping with magnificent courage that the 
burdens resting on all human enterprise 
might be lightened ; and yet every year 
wickedness rolls up its enormous cost, paid 
out of the earnings of the upright. If the 
expenditures caused by unrighteousness 
for half a century could be capitalized, the 
income would maintain the public school 
system for all time to come. If the annual 
cost of crime could be devoted to the 
adornment of the city, every year would 
see added to its beauty an object, perma- 
nent and refining, which in a score of years 
would make the city almost fulfill our 
dreams of the splendor of the City of God. 
Religion, alive to this economic truth, is 
just beginning to make herself felt in quar- 
ters in which, heretofore, she has been re- 
garded as too unworldly to have the right 
to speak. It is becoming clear that the ma- 
terial welfare of the city is as truly in the 
custody of Religion as in that of industry 
and trade, and Religion has once more 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS, 115 

found herself entrusted with a message. If 
in these last years we have seen, as thank 
God we have, critical revolutions in the 
conduct of the municipal business of more 
than one great city, — if waste and cost 
have so thoroughly exasperated the people 
that they have turned upon wicked doers 
and cast them out, we surely have been 
careless observers if we have not seen that 
it was Religion in its simplest and most 
august form — the form of righteousness — 
which created the passion needed to rouse 
the people to attempt their emancipation 
from the tyranny of the wickedness which 
was not only fouling all the avenues of 
public life, but also draining the resources 
of the people to pay the bills of sin. It 
has not been theology nor ecclesiasticism 
which have won recent battles for muni- 
cipal reform, — it has not been the demon- 
strated extravagance or corruption of offi- 
cial life which have roused the people's 
indignation, nor the sense of the huge 
cost of meeting the charges of wicked- 
ness ; it has been Religion, seizing the 
people's angry discontent with the econo- 
mic burdens unrighteousness has laid upon 



Il6 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

them, which has lashed the public con- 
science, until it rose up in wrath and did the 
work which nothing but the public con- 
science can ever do. Remember that the 
economic cost of crime has always been a 
fact; remember too that it has been urged 
again and again in deaf ears, if you would 
perceive that it was Religion, by its appeal 
to the instinct of righteousness, which 
turned economic cost into an irresistible 
argument for a moral reformation. A city 
without a theology may live a prosperous 
life, but a city without righteousness is a 
ship without a sail, an engine without 
steam. The distinct contribution Religion 
has made in recent times to political sci- 
ence is the political truth that you cannot 
build up a society or a state ordered, free, 
prosperous, and safe, unless you build it 
upon righteousness, and that righteous- 
ness, to be strong, continuous, inflexible, 
indestructible, must be the product of a 
profound belief in God. Atheism, what- 
ever else may be said of it, is uneconomic, 
because it fails to create the righteousness 
upon which economic prosperity solidly 
and forever rests. You can out-argue it 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. \\J 

speculatively, and it will return. You can 
make it a crime punishable by law, and it 
will survive. You can make it an eccen- 
tricity, indicative of an unphilosophical esti- 
mate of the world and of man, and it will 
persist. But indict it as hostile to the 
proved best interests of men who must 
live their lives on this earth, because it is 
hostile to that righteousness without which 
life is not worth the pains required to live 
it, and atheism shrivels into the cold, un- 
happy thing it is and ever must be. The 
argument which all men understand is that 
which can be stated in concrete terms. 
Exactly that is what Religion is doing to- 
day. She has done her best to show the 
enormous cost of sin, has set before our eyes 
with unprecedented vividness the picture 
of society struggling to provide for all her 
members the chances each has the right to 
expect, battling with all adverse conditions 
that she may gather sustenance for all her 
sons, — yet perpetually checked by the per- 
petual resistance offered by her criminals, 
loafers, and the prematurely exhausted, — 
and then has cried to men, " Your noblest 
endeavors, your wisest laws, your cleverest 



Il8 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

contrivances, are all in vain without the 
righteousness which lives from God to 
man." 

I foresee that insistence upon the eco- 
nomic value of righteousness runs the risk 
of being regarded as rank utilitarianism, 
or as an exalted form of political philoso- 
phy. It might be urged, " You are not 
playing fair, you are not consistent with 
even your own dangerously broad defini- 
tion of Religion, — sensitiveness and re- 
sponsiveness to the Divine, — you are only 
urging what would be urged by the most 
thorough-going materialist, you are appeal- 
ing to a sordid pecuniary consideration, 
and yet you claim that it is Religion which 
speaks." But the answer to that is simply 
this, that when the economic value of 
righteousness is insisted upon, there is 
always beating warm beneath it the con- 
viction that righteousness is the result of 
a personal and conscious relation to God. 
If Religion can convince us that godliness 
is great gain in this world, if it can rouse 
in us the acute belief that, in this world, 
we are suffering huge losses from the pre- 
valence of wickedness, then it has put itself 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 1 19 

in better position to assert with power 
that righteousness is possible, not to say 
rational, only as we both believe that the 
moral nature of God is at the foundation 
of the moral order of the world, and that 
only a moral God can produce moral men. 
Righteousness, Religion is now dogmati- 
cally teaching, becomes concrete and lasting 
by faith in a Divine source for it, not by 
any clearest demonstration of its necessity 
and value. Religion frankly acknowledges 
that it is now emphasizing the imperative 
necessity of righteousness to the material 
welfare of society for no other reason than 
this : to set men seriously thinking how 
righteousness is produced. It is harnessing 
the lower motive to the service of the 
higher. It is with renewed vigor and im- 
mensely increased confidence bringing the 
economic argument to bear upon society's 
thinking for the sake of getting a more 
attentive, more sympathetic hearing, for 
the strictly spiritual argument. It does 
not for one moment advocate righteous- 
ness solely because righteousness is mate- 
rially profitable to the community. Yet, 
because that advocacy is legitimate, it de- 



120 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

clares we ought to make the most of it, to 
be moved and energized by it, and finally 
add it to that supreme motive by which 
every religious man should be swayed, — 
the motive that unrighteousness should 
be displaced by righteousness because that 
is the will of God. It always comes back 
to that. Religion has been declaring to 
society with almost startling passion, " You 
must possess integrity, self-mastery, purity; 
these are the only qualities that can save 
you ; all your successes, your wealth, your 
knowledge, your power, your countless 
contrivances for human comfort, and your 
multiplied chances for expansion, are really 
uncovering your exigent need of moral 
strength. The history of your unparal- 
leled material and intellectual progress 
is matched by the dark history of your 
moral failures. And you have at last 
begun to perceive it. You know that the 
uneasiness which pervades the huge bulk 
of your complex organism is a moral un- 
easiness. You are afraid. You distrust 
yourself. You are wondering how long 
you can go on with all this flagrant wick- 
edness in the midst of you, with all this 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 121 

suspected powerlessness to make the pos- 
session of material riches safe. You are 
either vainly trying to blink the facts, or 
idly hoping that some scheme may emerge 
from this chaos of discussion and experi- 
ment which shall, of itself, produce the 
conditions which you are clever enough to 
perceive are inexorably demanded if peace 
and security are to be your lasting portion. 
I join my voice to yours when you cry 
that the sole safeguard of successful society 
is the prevalence, not simply of sound 
political or economic principles, but of 
that moral intensity and ethical virility 
which are to the community what founda- 
tions are to the building that rests its vast 
weight upon them. I reinforce your in- 
dictment of wickedness of every sort as 
the black, ugly portent in the social sky 
over our heads. But more than that, 
I affirm, with a confidence reinforced by 
all past history and reinvigorated by the 
events of to-day, that the righteousness re- 
quired to give each of us security is to be 
found in a deeper dependence upon God. 
I may have relaxed the rigor of my theo- 
logy, I may have given up the attempt 



122 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

to inflict penalties, I may be entreating 
instead of commanding and threatening 
as in the days of old ; but I insist, with 
an imperiousness almost novel, that out 
of me received, used, magnified, and sup- 
ported, can alone come the power that cre- 
ates the integrity, justice, and purity you 
so sorely need." So speaks Religion to 
society. It is the utterance of old truth, 
but the tone of that utterance is so fresh, 
so strong, so confident, that it is almost 
as if a Religion of righteousness were new 
given. And society is listening; she is 
beginning to heed these voices proceeding 
from quarters whence she has for so long 
heard only contentions about dogmas and 
politics. Original sin is pushed aside by 
interest in contemporary sin. Baptismal 
regeneration is thrust one side by a pas- 
sion to secure goodness in all men whether 
baptized or not. Religion has her eye 
upon concrete society, and is anxious, with 
a divine solicitude, that the social organ- 
ism shall be penetrated with a thorough- 
going dependence upon God, because only 
so shall be arrested the vast economic 
waste which is taxing society's resources 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 123 

beyond her permanent ability to pay. 
This discovered genius for enforcing the 
value of godliness to human society and 
government is one of the most character- 
istic marks of the expansion of Religion, 
and is destined soon to become the bond 
of a new union between Religion and the 
world. For it is a frank declaration that, 
after all, their interests are one. It is a 
revelation, if you like, that they belong to 
one another, and that even the material 
welfare of organized society is bound up 
with the life of Religion, and the concern 
of the citizen is identical with the concern 
of the saint. 

We ought to be prepared to see this 
new attitude of Religion increasingly 
strengthened in the immediate future, be- 
cause Religion is sure to draw to herself, 
when she speaks as we have just been 
making her speak, all those who felt little 
interest in her when she seemed concerned 
only with the life that is to come and 
bent only on getting men through this 
world in any sort of fashion, because the 
other world is the only one of any impor- 
tance. So long as the New Jerusalem was 



124 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

accounted the city for which we were 
to wait and for citizenship in which we 
were to prepare, the glowing splendor of 
which ought to reconcile us to a patient, 
unenterprising toleration of the city of 
Boston, it was idle to expect men whose 
heart was in the activities of this earth 
to care very much for what Religion con- 
cerned herself with. Whether or not a 
man had been baptized could not be con- 
cluded by anything he did as an official of 
the town. His view of inspiration and his 
eschatology could not be learned by watch- 
ing him in the market. If he took bribes, 
his baptism was the symbol of a super- 
stition. If his word was rightly distrusted, 
men cared little for his theological opin- 
ions or his ecclesiastical attachments. His 
unrighteousness was entailing economic 
loss to society, and Religion seemed more 
anxious about his theology and ecclesias- 
ticism than about his character. Rightly, 
therefore, society concluded that Religion 
was of little value, spite of its promises 
of heaven and its threats of hell, because 
society perceived that unrighteous men 
would not find heaven to their taste were 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 125 

they safely landed in it ; and it wondered 
with a legitimate wonder how correct opin- 
ions united with bad character could pro- 
duce any other results in heaven than they 
are producing on earth, namely, loss, mis- 
ery, and waste. But now that Religion ac- 
counts Boston as of equal importance with 
the New Jerusalem, because it takes, al- 
most literally, the vision of St. John, who 
saw the " New Jerusalem coming down out 
of heaven " to occupy this earth, and be- 
cause it resents with the passion of a bur- 
dened taxpayer the presence of costly 
wickedness and would banish it, not simply 
as wickedness, but as indefensible cost, 
Religion has made itself attractive — at- 
tractive by its usefulness to the social life 
that now is. The old question whether 
Religion should have anything to do with 
politics ceases to be a question, for politics 
is Religion and Religion politics, by virtue 
of the identity of their ideal struggle to 
produce political righteousness and right- 
eous politics. Religion has enlarged her 
territory and made room for those earnest 
spirits upon whose hearts rests heavy the 
burden of the world's costly sin. 



126 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

But some men will ask, " Has organ- 
ized Religion eagerly and sympathetically 
accepted this new attitude of real Reli- 
gion ? " It has not. It is still too eagerly 
absorbed in quesions of dogma and polity 
to manifest to society that passion for 
righteousness of which I have spoken so 
much, still too unconscious of its real iden- 
tity with the world against whose attitude 
toward it it fights, and which resents its 
description of itself as a misdescription of 
what a true Church should be. And yet 
the signs of the coming revival of organ- 
ized Religion to meet the new needs of a 
new day are neither few nor feeble. Here 
and there are churches which have awak- 
ened to the fact that their only chance of 
life, their only warrant for hoping that 
they can gain the ear and hold the love of 
the multitudes, is in their more frank and 
hearty identification of themselves with 
the real life of the people, tormented by 
wickedness and impoverished by costly 
crime. And when all organized Religion 
shall have courageously thrown itself into 
the struggle against unrighteousness, then 
we shall hear the Church crying, " Unto 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 127 

you, O men, I call; give me your encour- 
agement and cheer, if you cannot give me 
your belief; give me your strong, intelli- 
gent, virile help in my effort to produce 
the righteousness which the poor, stum- 
bling world so sorely needs, and out of 
your help, so given, must one day come 
a strong and reasonable belief; for it is 
abstention from the effort to make society 
righteous, here and now, which makes 
belief in a Redeemer and a world to come 
so hard." 

But not only is Religion insisting upon 
the necessity of righteousness to the eco- 
nomic welfare of society, she is re-defining 
righteousness. It needed re-definition. 
Righteousness is, as we might phrase it, 
conformity to what is right, that is, to 
what is good. This is perfectly simple 
and thoroughly clear. One need only 
know what is right, or good, in order to 
determine whether or not a man is right- 
eous, whether or not a society possesses 
righteousness. But to know what is right 
or good is not the simple affair it pro- 
mises at the start to be. The determina- 
tion of right is not the sole work of the 



128 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

intellect and the conscience. The intel- 
lect may be weak and the conscience dark, 
and this weakness and this darkness may 
be the result of forces working uncon- 
sciously in the total nature. Consequently, 
we find that even men seriously in earnest 
for righteousness may blunder, and substi- 
tute for real righteousness conventional 
righteousness. The history of Religion 
abundantly declares how frequently this 
happens. The Old Testament is very 
largely the record of a people's struggle to 
keep the real righteousness, which is salva- 
tion, from degenerating into that counter- 
feit of it presented by express statutes 
which could be scrupulously kept while the 
righteousness they were intended to secure 
was successfully evaded. Selfishness of 
whatever sort can always play havoc with 
statutes and yet manage to preserve a 
fairly good conscience. That was the be- 
setting sin of Israel. The nation had a 
genius for righteousness, never ceased ex- 
tolling it, declared righteousness was peace 
and joy, taught their children that only the 
righteous should be blessed and that the 
wicked should not live out half his days. 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 129 

The Old Testament is simply unintelligi- 
ble without the word righteousness to in- 
terpret it. It plays as conspicuous a part 
in the history, poetry, and prophecy as 
does Jehovah himself. It is canvas and 
pigment both, with emotion as color. No 
one can take up the Old Testament to- 
day, and read it as the record of a nation's 
religious struggle, and fail to be impressed 
by Israel's continuous, insistent, and con- 
sistent belief that salvation is the outcome 
of righteousness. The one hundred and 
nineteenth psalm is a marvelous achieve- 
ment in poetry, which can sing the praises 
of law, statute, commandments, testimo- 
nies, precepts, and judgments, through a 
hundred seventy and six perfected lines, 
with no impression of monotonous repeti- 
tion ; but it is more than matched by the 
whole body of the Hebrew Scriptures, 
which begin and end with the exultant cry, 
" Thou hast loved righteousness and hated 
iniquity, therefore God hath anointed thee 
with the oil of joy above thy fellows." 
And yet, " Poor Israel ! Poor ancient peo- 
ple ! It was revealed to thee that right- 
eousness is salvation : the question what 



130 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

righteousness is was thy stumbling-stone. 
Seer of the vision of peace that yet could 
not see the things which belong unto thy 
peace ! " — - could not see that the conven- 
tional righteousness of statutes and cere- 
monies scrupulously kept was not the right- 
eousness which exalteth and saveth the 
nation and the man. The ruin of Israel 
was not wrought by her failure to perceive 
the necessity of righteousness, but by her 
failure to understand exactly what it was, 
— justice, mercy, and truth ; by her falling 
before that world-old, fierce, subtle, satanic 
temptation to cloud her perfect vision 
for the sake of temporary gain. There 
grew up that masterly system by the opera- 
tion of which injustice was made to look 
like justice, cruelty sheltered itself behind 
law, and blindness became vision. But 
there is nothing peculiarly Jewish in that 
system, except its form, and its form is 
determined altogether by local custom and 
national chances. Christianity started out 
with the clearest possible perception of 
the fatal error in Jewish righteousness. 
Jesus laid his finger upon the heart of 
Israel and said, " The disease is there ; you 






RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 131 

are trying to create righteousness by ma- 
chinery, the machinery of statute. Good- 
ness cometh not by way of the under- 
standing, it cometh by way of the heart, 
it is an inward creation. Not the man 
who understands, but the man who does, 
possesses the secret of the Lord." No- 
thing could be more satisfactory than was 
Christianity at the beginning, in laying 
bare what righteousness is and how it 
could be obtained. It boldly declared in 
the face of venerable tradition and invet- 
erate custom that statutes, ceremonies, and 
observances have nothing to do with it. 
As St. John explicitly, and with refresh- 
ing candor, said, " He that doeth right- 
eousness is righteous." No one else can 
be. And what, at the start, distinguished 
the early Christians from the Jews was not 
theological opinion or ecclesiastical polity, 
for it required nigh a hundred years to 
complete the doctrinal separation of the 
new faith from the old, so that everybody 
could appreciate it ; it was a fundamental 
difference between the two conceptions of 
the origin, and the nature of righteous- 
ness. Jesus, and the Apostles after Him, 



132 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

asked men to divest goodness of its set- 
ting, to banish from their minds the idea 
that any part of outwardness of conduct 
had anything to do with inwardness of 
life. They were not to expect righteous- 
ness of life to grow out of righteousness of 
conduct, but conduct to grow out of life. 
The whole stress of early Christian teach- 
ing, and the great glory of early Chris- 
tian life, are right there : the fundamental 
truth that righteousness is the expression 
of a pure heart and a trained, disciplined, 
energized will, joyfully placed at the ser- 
vice of the pure heart, — the whole man 
intent on securing the favor, not of men, 
but of God. The essential inwardness of 
righteousness is the commanding feature 
of the earliest Christianity. It seems im- 
possible that Christians should ever repeat 
the blunder of the Jews, when we recall 
how plain Jesus made the path which 
avoids that blunder. But we have re- 
peated it, and are only just now discov- 
ering how great it is and how costly it 
has been. Let me try to make this plain. 
One of the evil results of an otherwise 
beneficent evangelicalism pushed too far 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 133 

— or, rather, too heavily emphasized, — 
is its doctrine of justification by faith, in- 
terpreted (as it was inevitable it would be 
interpreted when accepted undiscriminat- 
ingly by ordinary people) as meaning that 
it is far more important that a particular 
doctrine should be believed and acted upon 
than that conduct should square with eter- 
nal right. No one has ever frankly taught, 
nor ever will, that conduct is of no impor- 
tance. On the contrary, evangelicalism 
urged that the man justified by faith in 
Jesus Christ should manifest as a result 
the fruits of the spirit : love, joy, long- 
suffering, meekness, temperance. But the 
special emphasis was upon the conscious- 
ness of justification ; that was the critical 
affair; all else was important, but secon- 
dary. Consequently, salvation was inter- 
preted as the conscious possession of par- 
don of sin, not sins simply ; and as the 
conviction that this pardon would stay by 
throughout the longest life, warranting its 
hope of entrance into heaven. u Once 
saved, forever saved," became a postulate 
of evangelicalism. When evangelicalism 
ceased to be a visible, organized, powerful 



134 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

body, residing in many of the denomina- 
tions and welcomed as the highest expres- 
sion of Christian faith, it did not cease to 
be an influence. It colored the ideas of 
four fifths of all our religious bodies, even 
after they ceased to look to it as authorita- 
tive and fruitful. Consequently, the ten- 
dency to substitute doctrinal correctness 
on the one hand, and demonstrative emo- 
tion on the other (and, between them, lib- 
eralism as well), for inward righteousness, 
has characterized Religion for nigh a cen- 
tury. To be sure, that tendency appeared 
very early in the history of Christianity, and 
was carrying almost everything before it 
when Christianity and the Empire joined 
hands; but it never, perhaps, was so fla- 
grant as within the memory of living men. 
More than half the dreadful scandals which 
have disgraced and harmed organized Re- 
ligion in the last fifty years can be traced 
back to this vicious, irrational, and irreli- 
gious tendency to make doctrinal correct- 
ness, demonstrative emotion, and liberal- 
ism, do duty for that " stern daughter of the 
voice of God " which insists that integrity 
of life is the only legitimate ground for 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 135 

believing that a man is justified before his 
God. The difficulty is not in the doctrine, 
but with the use — or, rather, the misuse 
— of the doctrine which is held ; and once 
more the traditions of men make void the 
commandments of God. The limitations 
wisely placed upon this Lectureship expli- 
citly forbid the illustration of this evil 
tendency in current Religion about us, but 
that man of us who has not indignantly 
resented or sadly owned the disastrous 
working of this tendency is dull and 
stupid, or, what is worse, dishonest. It 
assumes as many forms as there are organ- 
izations to shape it to their ends. But it 
is, and ever has been, that worst of all 
foes, the foe that intrenches itself, unsus- 
pected, within the household walls. Now 
Religion, as I said, has begun to discover 
her blunder or her sin — call it which you 
will — and to set herself once more in her 
rightful place as the teacher of doctrine 
for the sake of righteousness. Her great 
announcement is no longer the absolute 
necessity either of a definite dogma or of 
a particular experience ; it is rather, " Let 
every one that nameth the name of Christ 



136 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

depart from iniquity. Abhor that which 
is evil, cleave to that which is good." No- 
thing can take the place of that real right- 
eousness which is inward personal purity ; 
not thorough adhesion to any definitive 
dogma, not the mystical spell of a demon- 
strative spiritual experience, not a liberal 
mind. For, however true the dogma, pre- 
cious the experience, and beautiful the 
tolerance, and however powerful, in coop- 
eration with a consenting will, to develop 
purity, integrity, and truthfulness, they are 
not the equivalents of these virtues. The 
disasters and losses which have ever over- 
taken Religion when she has forgotten 
the imperative of Jesus, " Seek ye first the 
Kingdom of God and the righteousness of 
it," are as natural as the shipwreck of the 
vessel which bends new sails on rotten 
masts and spars. Insistence upon real 
righteousness is now everywhere the char- 
acter mark of living Religion. The new 
fields on which Religion is to-day culti- 
vating righteousness, the new conditions 
which she is attempting to create by an 
application of it to enterprises with which 
it was once thought to have nothing to do, 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 137 

we shall speak of in another lecture ; but 
to-night I wish to make clear, as a needed 
preparation for what is to follow, that Reli- 
gion has fairly been born again in her 
fresh consecration of herself, even at the 
sacrifice of some things she has long held 
dear, to the cause of producing a type of 
goodness which will stand the fierce tests 
applied to it by the mordant temper of 
our day. 

But, it may be urged, has not this new 
attitude of Religion towards actual life 
been purchased at the cost of paring down 
her cardinal truths ? Has she not been 
compelled to throw aside much which has 
so long been identified with her very sub- 
stance as to appear to be essential to her 
very existence as Religion, as distinguished 
from morality ? Have you not unwittingly 
explained the " theological thaw " of which 
we have heard and seen so much in the 
last quarter of a century ? Have you not 
lost from Religion what you have gained 
for righteousness ? Are you not pleading 
for an ethical school in place of organized 
Religion ? And what room have you left 
for God ? These are indeed fair and they 



138 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

are familiar questions. But an adequate 
reply is not difficult. Religion has cast 
aside nothing that is peculiarly hers, no- 
thing that is essential to her integrity. 
The old elemental beliefs, say what men 
will, are as resolutely held as ever, though 
their interpretation changes as often as 
religious experience deepens and reveals 
a new thought of God. Divine pardon is 
as eagerly besought to-night by some sin- 
ner overtaken, not alone by the material 
consequence of his sin, but by the acute 
consciousness that he can no longer be- 
lieve the love of God, as it was in the days 
of Wesley ; but what that pardon means, 
what it involves, and what it may accom- 
plish, look very strange beside what was 
thought of it a hundred and fifty years 
ago. The death of the Redeemer as the 
guarantee that the obstacles to pardon are 
made by human hands, and that besides 
these there are none in heaven or hell, is 
as firmly rooted in current Religion as it 
has ever been, though we no longer hear 
of contrived plans of salvation and very 
little of the atonement. The real expla- 
nation of the present passion of Religion 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 139 

for righteousness is not the decay of theo- 
logy, but of the theological temper, not 
the displacement of old beliefs, but the 
replacement of them in their true posi- 
tion. " You may he orthodox, you must be 
righteous, if you would inherit that eternal 
life which is as true a part of this life as 
this life is of that which is to be. You 
may find yourself unable to accept what I 
hold to be true, no matter ; you must strive 
to develop love, joy, long-suffering, meek- 
ness, gentleness, temperance, truth, into 
concrete character. These are the fruit 
of that spirit which you can receive, even 
though you cannot receive my statements 
of what God has revealed as truth." To 
speak particularly of the Christian Church. 
It holds, in its familiar language, that 
" Baptism and the Lord's Supper are 
necessary to salvation." But when it says 
that, it means by salvation a far larger 
thing than was meant when that proposi- 
tion was framed. Books are necessary to 
intellectual salvation, but a man is not in- 
tellectually saved by shutting him up in 
a library full of them. It is only as the 
student transmutes books into personal 



140 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

knowledge that he delivers himself from 
ignorance ; and the process of intellectual 
salvation is a long one, never finished, be- 
cause truth is never, on this earth, fully 
explored and disclosed. Baptism is not a 
magical rite, it is the symbol of entrance 
into a chance " to live a godly and Chris- 
tian life.'' It is " necessary to salvation " 
only in the sense that to possess a chance to 
be virtuously brought up is necessary to the 
development of the personal righteousness, 
which is salvation. The Lord's Supper is 
necessary to salvation only because through 
it and by it the reverent soul receives a 
Divine strength which that reverent soul 
is to transmute into the personal right- 
eousness which is salvation. Neither 
Baptism nor the Lord's Supper are salva- 
tion, any more than matriculation and resi- 
dence at the university are intellectual 
salvation ; but they are in Religion what 
matriculation and the university are in 
education, the bestowment of the chance, 
the help, the inspiration, the direction 
which in the one lead to knowledge, and 
in the other lead to righteousness. To 
educate, not to grant diplomas ; to make 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS, 141 

righteous, not to secure doctrinal correct- 
ness, are the aim of the College and the 
Church ; yet the one grants diplomas and 
the other asks for faith. Religion is in 
no danger of becoming an ethical school 
because her passion for righteousness is 
measured by her conviction that righteous- 
ness is not the product of a perception, 
but the outcome of a faith in God. Her 
new attitude towards conduct is not at the 
expense of any cardinal truth, because her 
cardinal truth is that salvation, the state 
she aims to produce, is righteousness, and 
righteousness is possible only as man 
knows, obeys, and loves a righteous God. 
And we have not lost from Religion what 
we have gained for righteousness, because 
there is no real righteousness without Re- 
ligion. 

I think we have but begun to appreciate 
what this promises for the future. It leaves 
dogmatic truth intact, but puts it in its 
proper place. It leaves ecclesiasticism 
substantially untouched in bulk, but de- 
clares it is an instrument and not an end. 
It refuses any longer to go on with the 
old reversal of the divine order, righteous- 



142 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

ness and the kingdom first. Religion is 
asserting that all other things — faith, wor- 
ship, creed — will never be added unto it 
unless first of all it can make it plain that 
its foremost purpose is to produce right- 
eousness of life. 

A score of years ago Matthew Arnold 
gave to the world " Literature and Dogma." 
It was a strong, clear plea for reality, a 
somewhat flippant, if brilliant, arraignment 
of the Religion which made the three Lord 
Shaftesburys of more importance than 
the development of justice, mercy, and 
truth in the life of the English people. 
After twenty years, what do we see ? The 
Bishops of Gloucester and Winchester 
still believing that their conception of Je- 
hovah is far truer to fact and reason than 
the metaphysical " not ourselves which 
makes for righteousness " that Mr. Arnold 
defines and explains in a speculative 
phraseology which rivals the nomenclature 
he condemns. Not one of their dogmas is 
relinquished, but no longer. are they set in 
the door of entrance into life, no longer 
are they urged as the condition of salva- 
tion. Mr. Arnold would have swept them 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 143 

relentlessly away. The result he was sin- 
cerely bent on securing, and to which he 
gave his genius for revealing the intensely 
spiritual meaning of the Bible, seemed to 
him possible only as dogma was supplanted 
by literature. But all that Mr. Arnold 
contended for in his exaltation of right- 
eousness has been secured. Dogma re- 
mains ; it always will remain. Mr. Arnold 
himself framed a new dogma which for a 
while was ardently accepted by the dogma- 
haters ; but righteousness is now almost 
everywhere in Religion made the end 
which dogma must loyally serve. It is a 
great triumph, the meaning and result of 
which we as yet but imperfectly grasp, but 
in the coming years w r e shall more and 
more reap the fruits of it in the finer char- 
acter, the larger moral power, of those who 
profess and call themselves religious, and 
in the more ready allegiance to Religion, 
with her faith and worship, of all those 
who forsook her in the days when she was 
theologically stubborn and ecclesiastically 
insistent, rather than obsessed by a passion 
for righteousness. 

Finally, it must needs be said that Reli- 



144 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

gion has by no means thoroughly finished 
her work of discriminating between real 
and conventional righteousness. For the 
frame in which conduct is set still blinds 
us to the moral quality of that conduct. 
There are no more misleading terms in 
use to-day than " criminal classes," " vicious 
classes." The "criminal class" means, to 
almost all of us, low, brutal ruffians who 
murder, steal, and burn whenever the safe 
opportunity is presented. The "vicious 
classes " are the social outcasts, stained 
black or red with dissipation, debauchery, 
and sensuality, and frankly refusing to do 
any work save as work is necessary to 
keep body and soul together. These, we 
say, are the moral pests of all society; 
these are the real menace to civilization 
and corporate righteousness. Their sur- 
roundings are repulsive, base, filthy; or 
tawdry and impure. Their haunts are un- 
der constant surveillance. We increase 
the police force on their account. We 
localize them, and then speak of the " bad 
quarters " of the town in which they con- 
gregate and to which they give a notorious 
character. Their very appearance is for- 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 145 

bidding, their language coarse and brutal, 
their manner of life repulsive. Yes, truly, 
these are the " criminal and vicious classes" 
whom we justly dread, and on whom we 
pour our indignation. But Religion, be- 
fore it shall thoroughly rehabilitate itself, 
must include in the criminal class that not 
inconsiderable number of respected, though 
not respectable, men who break law in gen- 
tlemanly fashion, who have grown richer 
far than any burglar, by methods not one 
whit more honest than the burglar's and 
tenfold more destructive to the security 
of society. There is no smallest room for 
doubt that thieving on a colossal scale has 
characterized all too many of our huge 
enterprises of the last twenty years. The 
courts now and then convict it, but for the 
most part it goes untouched. Too often it 
is like the clever work of the bank burglar 
who leaves no clue for his detection. But 
the fact of robbery remains. Success, with 
the concomitants of good breeding, good 
manners, generous alms, and pure life, has 
blinded Religion to the moral fact that 
breach of law lies at the door of many of 
our " best citizens," as we like to call them. 



146 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

There are too many corporations wrecked 
outright, or rendered profitless, by men who 
are not included in the " criminal classes," 
who have, on the contrary, waxed fat and 
who shine, for us ever to believe that Reli- 
gion has done all she ought in discriminat- 
ing between real and conventional right- 
eousness, between real and conventional 
wrong. The contrast between the usual 
surroundings of crime and this fine and 
refined condition in which dishonest suc- 
cess, and the powerlessness of law, per- 
mit our well-bred, gentlemanly criminal to 
live, has befogged our moral vision. The 
beauty of the frame has made us forget 
the ugliness of the picture. But there are 
signs in our moral sky that the expansion 
of Religion in the direction of ethical clair- 
voyance will not always tolerate this con- 
fusion. Unrighteousness will be spied out 
and denounced even when its appearance 
is so respectable that it seems by right to 
deserve respect. We shall no longer de- 
fine the criminal class as the ruffians and 
common thieves who infest society in bru- 
tal fashion ; we shall include in it any man 
who has broken laws, however safe he be 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 147 

from the penalties of the law which he has 
broken. 

And so of the vicious class. Religion 
will ask, if indeed it is not asking now, 
whence comes the material support of this 
dreadful vice which festers in all our great 
towns. And it will not hesitate to track it 
back to the doors of those gentlemanly 
people whose evil desires, regulated by a 
devilish calculation of what it is safe or 
dangerous for the man of good repute to 
do, lead them from the quiet, respectable 
quarters of the town, or from well behaved 
villages, into the haunts of vice, at which 
they pharisaically shudder when safely 
back again in their homes. There will 
surely come a day of reckoning between 
the so-called vicious classes and those who, 
preserving their respectability, have helped 
to support vice, and it is odds on which 
side shall lie the weight of blame. But 
meanwhile Religion, expanding more and 
more to the moral exigencies of a complex 
and artificial society, will grow bold and 
firm in its determination to characterize 
with ethical exactness, and to treat with un- 
pitying and equal sternness, the wickedness 



148 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

which is dull and ugly, or clever and re- 
fined. The frame fools no artist as to the 
artistic value of the picture. The dexter- 
ously arranged lights of the auctioneer mis- 
lead only untrained and conceited purchas- 
ers. It may be hard for me to class the 
drunkenness of the ragged sot with the tip- 
siness of the fine-mannered gentleman, the 
lowness which is brutal with the vileness 
that sparkles. Indeed, without Religion, 
uttering itself as righteousness, it may be 
impossible for me to see that each is but a 
manifestation of a wickedness which is only 
too ready to don rags, or purple and fine 
linen. But that only goes to prove how nec- 
essary Religion is, and how necessary, too, 
that its standard of righteousness should be 
such as inerrantly to discriminate between 
the conventional and the real. "All unright- 
eousness is sin," runs the old Hebraic phrase. 
Centuries old, we have not yet learned its 
truth ; but we are learning it. Out of the 
perpetual tendency of Religion — markedly 
vigorous at the end of the century, as I 
have tried to-night to set forth — to trans- 
late itself into conduct, is to come that in- 
errant, quick perception of intrinsic right- 



RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 149 

eousness which shall deliver us from the 
moral blunders which we excuse on the 
ground of love of the beautiful, the clever, 
the refined. Yes I out of Religion. For 
what but Religion is nurturing men in, 
righteousness and love? What but Reli- 
gion speaks uncompromisingly of our need 
of godliness? The new claim which she is 
making upon the loyalty of all men is pre- 
eminently one which appeals to them on 
the score of what she is doing for the life 
that now is, — never mind, for to-night, 
that which is to come. If she is hold- 
ing men back from wickedness, if she is 
reclaiming criminals and sinners, setting 
their feet once more in honest ways, then 
she is increasing the world's material pros- 
perity and saving its money for noblest 
uses. If she is insisting that the laws of 
health ought to be obeyed, or warning us 
of the inevitable physical consequences of 
evil living, then she is improving the qual- 
ity of the public health. If she is preach- 
ing industry in her manual schools and 
inculcating thrift in her postal savings, then 
she is doing something to~ destroy the con- 
ditions under which the costly idle and the 



150 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

expensive improvident come to be. Every 
man whom she saves, in that large mean- 
ing of salvation we have used thus far in 
our lectures, is an addition to the common- 
weal, the commonwealth. The expansion 
of Religion is in very truth the hope of 
the future. Our security lies not in our 
wealth, our knowledge, our government, or 
our society. The public safety — safety for 
goods, for persons, for laws, for rights, for 
privileges — lies in the moral quality of the 
people produced by the Religion that holds 
up for the people's reverence a moral as 
truly as a loving God. There is no other 
place under heaven in which to bestow it 
and have it sure. Righteousness is peace, 
and it is peace because it is the work of 
God in man. 



IV. 

RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 

Within the last quarter of a century, to 
speak in the rough, there have grown up 
a class of problems and a series of move- 
ments which are rather loosely included 
under the name of Industrialism. These 
problems are made up of questions touch- 
ing wages, hours of work, conditions of 
labor, and distribution. The movements 
are almost entirely towards some sort of 
association, first for the protection of cer- 
tain advantages already secured, and, sec- 
ond, for the purpose of acquiring more of 
these advantages. I do not mean to assert 
that these problems and movements are 
characteristic of the last half of our century 
alone. In variant form they have always 
haunted civilization, disturbed it, affected 
it, and critically changed it. But the agi- 
tations in respect of labor, previous to our 
day, have been concerned with particular 



152 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

crafts. The organizations which resulted 
from those agitations were essentially local 
and selfish. The trades guilds were de- 
signed to be protective of the interests of 
a single industry. They seem to have 
included, but incidentally and for the pur- 
pose of increasing their attractiveness, a 
good many provisions for social pleasure 
and religious worship. They grew in 
strength, finally acquired political power, 
and developed the guild merchant, who was 
the capitalist of that elder day. But the 
idea of a federation of all guilds, in order 
to protect all labor of every kind, cannot 
be discovered in the history of those or- 
ganizations which are frequently cited as 
the ancient types of the labor unions of 
the modern world. The reason is not 
obscure. The conception of the interde- 
pendence of every form of industrial labor 
had not then been wrought out. The 
crafts appear to have been, economically 
and socially, independent of one another. 
Craft was caste, and caste has never con- 
cerned itself with any questions save those 
which touch its own safety. Craft as caste 
can be cruel, unjust, grasping, sordid; and 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 153 

the craft-guilds not infrequently built up 
their power and wealth at the expense of 
general labor, or of other crafts. It is 
unprofitable, therefore, to go back to the 
history of mediaeval guilds for light upon 
the industrial conditions which confront 
us to-day ; for what preeminently charac- 
terizes labor unions now is their clear 
perception and strong conviction that the 
interests of all labor, whatever be its spe- 
cial form, are one. It is the present soli- 
darity of labor which, more than any other, 
or all other, contemporary conditions, has 
created what is called Industrialism. And 
what brought the fact of solidarity into 
view is first, the rise of great industrial 
enterprises which transformed the pro- 
ducers of a finished article into producers 
of a single, and frequently slight, part of a 
completed article. The fact that the fail- 
ure of one shift to turn out in sufficient 
quantity, or with sufficient rapidity, the 
part it was set to produce, threw out an- 
other shift, dependent upon the first for 
prepared material, disclosed how intimately 
all the workers in a huge establishment 
are related to, and dependent upon, one 



154 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

another. Take the construction of a great 
modern building. It implies, for its pro- 
gressive, economical erection, the simul- 
taneous, or the cooperating, labor of stone 
masons, stone cutters, draymen, miners, 
smelters, iron-workers, house-smiths, car- 
penters, carvers, plasterers, painters, plum- 
bers, electricians, gas-fitters, and, above all, 
transportation. Each craft is dependent 
upon all the others. Disturbance in any 
one of them means disturbance of the 
whole ; and when skilled labor is scarce, 
or the organization of the particular craft 
disturbed is perfect, there is paralysis of 
the whole. A bid for a big contract is not 
only a nice calculation of the amount and 
cost of materials, of the amount and kind 
of labor, and of the special engineering or 
other difficulties likely to arise ; it is also 
a plan of campaign, mapping out strate- 
gically how to meet successfully the sur- 
prises and checks which may at any 
moment rise out of organized labor to 
confront the contractor. But this is an 
illustration of the interdependence of labor 
in modern times, drawn from a single 
enterprise. We need only extend it, until 



RELIGION A ND IND USTRIA LISM. 1 5 5 

it embraces the industries of the whole 
country, adequately to understand the co- 
lossal proportions of this new figure which 
has risen up in sturdy strength among the 
movements of the end of the century. 

Moreover, we must count in the con- 
solidation of the worlds markets. The 
provincialism of trade and industry has 
expanded into the cosmopolitanism of 
industrial and commercial activity. Fall 
River competes not alone with Lowell, 
Lawrence, and the new-born textile estab- 
lishments of the South, but with every 
loom running anywhere in the civilized 
world. Massachusetts carpets are dis- 
played by the side of genuine Oriental 
tapestries in the shops of the whole coun- 
try, and the wages of the Persian work- 
man, toiling in his solitary hut in the 
dim, far-off East, touch the wages of the 
weavers of New England. Any sort of 
production anywhere affects every sort 
of production everywhere. The industrial 
world is now one huge workshop, and all 
its parts are interdependent. 

Again, this feature of work is compar- 
atively new. It is the result of the new 



156 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

forces discovered in the last century, for 
the most part, but applied in this. The 
great industrial centres and the methods 
of regular and rapid transportation are all 
of recent origin. They came into exist- 
ence long before their economical signi- 
ficance was clearly foreseen, much less 
provided for. They have disturbed all the 
traditional economics, complicated all the 
venerable theories, and displaced many of 
the old methods. The nature and extent 
of the disturbance in industrial relations 
are far less momentous than we had reason 
to expect. The radical changes wrought 
by a score of new forces are out of all 
proportion to the economic difficulties 
thus far experienced. The number of 
strikes, the amount of violence, and the 
losses entailed during the last twenty-five 
years, however deplorable, do not for a 
moment compare with what might have 
been predicted by some prophet who, a 
hundred years ago, " had dipped into the 
future far as human eye could see," and 
had beheld the vision of all the industrial 
and commercial changes which are now 
before our eyes. We have gotten off thus 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 157 

far very easy, so easy, in fact, that there 
are still multitudes of people who refuse 
to believe that Industrialism presents any 
specially critical problems for civilization to 
solve. These people, it may be urged, are 
the blind, the dreamers, the idlers, and the 
hopelessly selfish. But they exist in force, 
and meanwhile Industrialism is filling our 
ears with its angry and defiant, or its sad 
and hopeless cries, and equally filling with 
reasonable alarm those who know how 
real are the problems this age is set to 
solve, how sure it is they will not settle 
themselves. The importance conceded to 
them is not too great, nor is the hard, 
patient, heroic study given them a costlier 
service than they deserve. So much real 
distress, so much blind revolt, so fright- 
fully huge losses, and so much bitter con- 
flict must mean — together with much 
wise, effective, and sagacious organization 
— the existence in the midst of us of a 
deep-seated trouble. In other words, we 
must reckon with Industrialism. 

Now labor — using that word for the 
sake of convenience, and asserting at the 
outset that it is totally unsatisfactory, be- 



158 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

ing largely misdescriptive — urges against 
civilization that it is unjust in these three 
respects: first, it metes out to labor an 
insufficient wage ; second, compels too 
long hours ; and third, insists upon an 
inequitable distribution of the products 
of labor. I beg you to notice that this 
charge brought against civilization differs 
from the concrete charges urged against 
individuals or corporations that employ 
labor. It implicitly declares that low 
wages, long hours, and an inequitable dis- 
tribution of what labor produces, are the 
result only incidentally of the injustice of 
Mr. A. or corporation B. They are the 
outcome of a condition which civilization 
has created deliberately or unconsciously, 
and which civilization is unwilling to 
change. The average workingman and 
the average capitalist, as well, regard them- 
selves as hopelessly at the mercy of forces 
which they vaguely call civilization or 
society. The workingman denounces soci- 
ety as unjust, cruel, sordid; claims that 
until she is thoroughly reformed, radically 
readjusted, there is no hope that labor 
will have its " rights.'' And, on the other 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 159 

hand, capital cries, " What can I do other 
than what I am doing? I did not create 
the law of supply and demand. I did not 
inaugurate competition. Society, not I, 
is responsible for them. I found them 
ready to my hand and I employed them, 
because there was nothing else to employ. " 
Each, at any rate, disclaims any share in 
creating or perpetuating the conditions 
which labor pronounces to be unjust. 
This accounts for two distinguishing fea- 
tures of the situation: first, the inability 
of Industrialism to prosecute its claims and 
obtain its " rights ; " and, second, the in- 
ability of our political economists to bring 
civilization to a real account. Civilization 
cannot be brought into court. Society 
cannot be subpoenaed. That is to say, 
civilization cannot be unjust, only a per- 
son or a corporation can be unjust, and 
civilization is neither a person nor a 
corporation. Society cannot be cruel, 
only a person or an association can be 
so. Justice and injustice, cruelty and 
kindness are qualities of civilized and 
social individuals. 1 However convenient, 

1 The Reverend William Kirkus, LL. B. 



160 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

therefore, it may be to charge civilization 
or society with wrong, it really means 
nothing, save as we regard civilization as 
an aggregate of civilized persons, who 
have concerted to do an unjust thing. If 
this aggregate of individuals has made a 
compact to do and to perpetuate a wrong, 
that compact must somehow be put in 
evidence ; otherwise the wrong is either 
no wrong at all, or is the expression of a 
maleficent, but undetermined, result of an 
aggregation of individuals. No one for a 
moment doubts that the result of the ex- 
istence of a great city is hardship for thou- 
sands of people, but no one will claim that 
great towns are formed for the purpose 
of subjecting any of their inhabitants to 
hardship. For the history of municipal 
legislation and administration is the story 
of unflagging attempts to reduce and re- 
move hardships. Savagery has its dis- 
advantages, but the reason savage people 
never accuse their savagery of responsi- 
bility for those disadvantages is that there 
are no contrasting advantages to bring the 
disadvantages into disrepute. In a civil- 
ized state, on the contrary, there are pro- 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 161 

duced abundantly striking and precious 
benefits in which all generally, but un- 
equally, share. " How big is too big? How 
small is too small ? " have ever been the 
questions civilized beings have always 
asked, as their respective shares were 
sharply contrasted. Why a palace, why a 
hovel? Why unceasing toil, why unlimited 
leisure ? But, as the tenure of the hovel 
stands or falls with the tenure of the pal- 
ace, as the laborers holiday is but a bit 
broken from the idlers life-long leisure, 
the easiest way of expressing discontent 
with social arrangements, and disbelief in 
their essential justice, has ever been to 
call civilization unjust and society cruel. 
Once more, I say, civilized human beings 
can be, and are, unjust, and their aggre- 
gated injustice be the dreadful thing it is 
claimed it is ; but civilization itself can 
do neither right nor wrong. We shall 
return to this further on in our lecture, 
but meanwhile it ought to be clear that 
to hold civilization responsible for low 
wages, long hours, and inequitable dis- 
tribution of labor's produce, is as idle as 
to hold the sunlight responsible for bad 



l62 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

pictures, or bronze guilty of the aesthetic 
crimes which so frequently stare us in the 
face in public squares. 

Remembering this perhaps common- 
place truth, let us examine the charges 
Industrialism urges against civilization. 
Its wages are too low. If by this is meant 
that wages are less than wage earners 
would like them to be, lower than is neces- 
sary to secure certain desirable, or at least 
desired, conditions and possessions, lower 
than is consistent with the cost of what is 
frequently, not always, necessary for the re- 
pair of exhausted force, we are all agreed. 
If any one asks me how I should like 
to work for one dollar per day, of course 
I must reply, I should not like it at all 
if I can get two or ten, any more than I 
should like ten if I could get a thousand ; 
nor should I like to earn less than would 
secure me certain comfortable conditions, 
good and enough food, good and enough 
clothing, sanitary housing, and the like. 
But after easily answering these easy ques- 
tions, every one of us knows that the real 
question is this : how much can the fund, 
out of which all wages are paid, devote to 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 163 

the compensation of labor without exhaust- 
ing itself, without failing to receive the 
increase necessary to preserve it as a fund 
from which wages can be paid ? That, of 
course, is a purely economical question, 
which only political economy can answer, 
if, indeed, there is ever to be an answer to 
it. Into its determination enter a score of 
complex considerations, the currency, the 
tariff, the state of trade, the quantity of 
labor — regarded for one moment as a 
commodity — the quantity of labor avail- 
able, the quantity of capital seeking em- 
ployment, the cost of living, the amount 
of the product, and the cost of producing, 
distributing, and selling it. Before civili- 
zation can say how much wages should be 
paid, science must first show us how much 
can be paid, without fatal injury to the 
industry itself. That wages fluctuate, that 
the nominal wage is sometimes greater 
than the real wage, and sometimes less; 
that wages are at times so high as to 
cause capital to stop paying them alto- 
gether, that on the other hand they fall so 
low as to make idleness as profitable as 
labor, since the idle man eats less than the 



1 64 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

toiler; that for one year capital enjoys 
profit and for another pays losses — all 
this is now so familiar that one is tempted 
to apologize for rehearsing it. But it is 
worth rehearsing for the sake of making 
clear this truth : that civilization, as such, 
is absolutely powerless to raise and equally 
powerless to lower the wages of any man. 
That act is performed by another aggre- 
gate of forces. The engineer who drives 
the fast express from New York to Spring- 
field, a distance of one hundred and thirty- 
five miles, in three hours and a half, re- 
ceives fifteen dollars for the trip. 1 The 
operative in Fall River, by working fifty- 
two hours per week, receives thirteen dol- 
lars. Now suppose civilization had a voice, 
what ought civilization say to this appar- 
ently gross inequality, not to say injus- 
tice ? Civilization would be under the 
necessity of ascertaining with exactness a 
score of facts difficult to obtain, and still 
more difficult to interpret in their bearing 
upon the point involved. That is to say, 
she would be obliged to accept the con- 

1 So, at least, I was informed in 1891, by apparently 
good authority. 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 165 

elusions of political economy, which has 
undertaken to collect, arrange, and inter- 
pret all the economical data which alone 
can determine whether the engineer is 
overpaid, the operative underpaid. Im- 
agine the result, if that bit of civilization 
represented here to-night should undertake 
to decide the question by a show of hands. 
The folly of it would be unspeakable. But 
what guarantee is there that our folly 
would become wisdom if we multiply our 
numbers here by a million, or by ten ? If, 
however, it is urged that civilization should 
promptly accept the precisely stated con- 
clusions of political economy, and straight- 
way come to the relief of the wage earn- 
ers, we are sadly obliged to confess that 
there are no such conclusions ; that is to 
say, conclusions touching the regulation of 
wages by legislation. Every attempt thus 
far made in that direction has resulted in 
demonstrated failure. The legal rate in the 
long run has been the market rate; and 
legislation by representatives of the people 
is the nearest approach to action by civili- 
zation conceivable. Indirectly, legislation 
can improve wages. It can provide for 



1 66 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

methods and times of payment, secure 
their protection from attachment, consti- 
tute them privileged debts, and make suit 
for their recovery an easy and inexpensive 
process ; but that is all. Political economy 
has to-day no accepted theory of regulat- 
ing wages by arbitrary enactment. It is 
obliged to admit that the law of supply 
and demand, no matter how much that law 
can be modified by special and local con- 
ditions, is still the only law according to 
which the business of the world can be 
conducted. Hence, to charge civilization 
with injustice in the matter of wage rates 
is irrational. The labor-unions, all forms 
of association for the protection of indus- 
trial interest, have had, and in the future 
are bound more and more to have, a power- 
ful influence in securing better wages, but 
only because " combinations can make bet- 
ter bargains than individuals. " The unions 
are the consolidation of labor just as ma- 
chinery is the consolidation of individ- 
ual skill, and they are destined to produce 
ultimately, when perfected, a permanent 
and beneficent effect upon the condition 
of wage earners. But the point I wish to 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 167 

make and keep clear is this : that labor 
unionism itself is an industrial factor to be 
treated like other factors, such as the cur- 
rency, the tariff, and the cost of living. 

Secondly, it is charged that civilization 
decrees long hours to wage earners. It is 
obvious that " long," applied to hours, is 
altogether indefinite. Eighty years ago, 
men worked ninety, and in some instances 
and countries, one hundred hours, a week. 
To-day, the average number of hours for 
adults is fifty-three, if we exclude a small 
number of special trades. Here, then, is 
a very considerable reduction of hours of 
labor, so considerable that to designate the 
hours of eighty years ago and those of to- 
day as " long " is misleading. The work- 
ingmen and the political economists have 
recognized this inconsistency, and have 
therefore agitated for a fixed number of 
working hours. First, for a ten-hour law, 
then a nine-hour law, next a nine-hour law 
with Saturday half holiday, and finally for 
an eight-hour law. Beyond eight hours no 
one has thus far proposed to go. Eight 
seems to be tacitly accepted as a limit. 
But as Mr. Cox and Mr. Webb, who are its 



1 68 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

vigorous and able champions, take pains to 
admit, " there is nothing sacred about the 
figure eight, and any other unit would do 
as well for the rough purposes of political 
agitation. Largely from historical and sen- 
timental considerations, eight has forced 
itself to the front as symbolizing the popu- 
lar demand for a shortened working day." 
Of the physiological and social advantages 
of reduced hours of toil, we shall speak 
further on. The primary question is what 
would be the economical effect of shorter 
hours on wages, on production, its cost 
and its amount, and finally on profit. The 
history of the economical results of the 
reduction of hours already secured, while 
it does not show an unvarying result to 
wages, production, and profit, conclusively 
proves that the dire prophecies of the man- 
ufacturers, and many of the economists, 
failed of fulfillment. Wages have not de- 
creased, except during a short period fol- 
lowing immediately the operation of the 
ten-hour and nine-hour laws in Great Bri- 
tain. Production has increased in amount 
and at no greater cost, although unchanged 
cost has been affected by causes other than 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM, 169 

that of reduced hours. Profits have de- 
creased, in a few instances have disap- 
peared. On the whole, however, the eco- 
nomical results of shorter working days 
during the last fifty years have vindicated 
the economical wisdom of the reduction. 
Shareholders and capitalists have recon- 
ciled themselves to diminished profits, if 
not with grace, at least with equanimity. 
The question of to-day is simply this : 
whether, under general industrial condi- 
tions, another reduction of hours can be 
made with safety to any dividends or prof- 
its at all, and with safety to wages. It is 
once more a problem in economics. That 
problem is still unsolved. There is no 
agreement among the economists, no agree- 
ment among manufacturers, nor among 
workingmen. The old arguments fail. 
That a man can do, and will do, as much 
work in nine hours as he did in twelve 
may be true ; that he can do as much in 
ten hours as he did in eleven is true. That 
his work will be more carefully done, with 
less damage to material and fewer defects 
in the manufactured fabric or article is 
true. But manifestly there is a point in 



170 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

reduction of hours beyond which it cannot, 
economically, be carried with safety to all 
the interests involved. Whether eight 
hours is that point, we have at present no 
means of knowing, and prophecy, when 
one reflects upon the multitudinous and 
complex elements involved, is not rational. 
When, then, civilization or society is ac- 
cused of guilt in imposing long hours upon 
labor, it ought to be clear, as it was in the 
case of wages, that civilization is powerless 
to inaugurate a change. Goodness and 
love, mercy and compassion, are simply in- 
capable of overriding the stern laws which 
decree what shall, and shall not, be the 
length of a day's toil. If the matter could 
be decided by a show of hands, very likely 
the eight-hour law would be enacted, if 
the owners of the hands were willing to 
decide the question solely on the basis of 
what they would like. Whether or not 
eight hours are sufficient for the continu- 
ance of a healthy industrialism has not 
been determined, however many individ- 
uals may think it has ; and until it is de- 
termined, and determined with enough of 
demonstration to win the rational assent 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 171 

of those whose interests are immediately 
concerned, both employers and employees, 
it is not sane to charge civilization with 
injustice; and, for reasons which will be 
given further on, when it is demonstrated 
that eight hours of work meets all the re- 
quirements of society, economically, society 
will not only yield, she will initiate. 

In the third place, Industrialism charges 
civilization with the responsibility of main- 
taining an inequitable distribution of la- 
bor's produce. But it ought first to be 
ascertained how much of all that is pro- 
duced by the only three producers known 
to political economy — land, capital, and 
labor— is directly due to labor. Suppose 
we imagine the total production of the 
United States to be heaped up on one of 
our western prairies in the shape of com- 
modities. It would be a vast and complex 
pile. Every article known to the arts and 
sciences would be there. Foods, clothing, 
drugs, implements, machinery, furniture, 
books, pictures, architects' drawings. To 
produce them there had to be land, capital, 
and labor. Each of these three is unpro- 
ductive without the other, in an industrial 



172 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

sense. Each is clamoring for the largest 
share of this heap of commodities. Rent, 
interest, and wages, put in their respective 
claims. Now rent, now interest, and now 
wages, seems the rightful claimant to the 
lion's share ; and each in turn has been 
the successful claimant, each in turn the 
rejected claimant, though in the long run 
land or rent has beaten capital, or interest 
has beaten labor, or wages. Occasionally 
there has been a fight, or scramble, as the 
three have gathered round the heap of 
commodities produced by their joint effort, 
eager for its division among them ; but no 
fight thus far has substantially altered the 
proportionate division which from time 
immemorial has been made. 1 The share 
of each has been increased in this century, 
but only because the heap is bigger than 
it used to be, for the nation's productivity 
has enormously increased. But Industrial- 
ism is not content with an actual larger 
share, it demands a larger proportionate 
share. The laboring man to-day is fed, 
clothed, and sheltered, in a manner of which 

1 Whence I borrowed this illustration I cannot now 
ascertain. I am confident, however, that it is not my own. 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 173 

the toilers of a hundred years ago never 
dreamed. He has opportunities of recrea- 
tion, self-culture, and self-assertion, some 
of which were open to a very limited num- 
ber in the last century, many of which were 
open to nobody. None the less, round 
that supposed heap of commodities are 
gathered the producers of it, each strenu- 
ous to maintain his claim to the biggest 
share, each resting his claim on his biggest 
contribution in its production. Labor, 
however, has recently made the claim that 
it produced the whole of it ; and, if it could 
substantiate that claim, it would get the 
whole of it; but labor has not convinced 
land and capital that its contention is true. 
Indeed, the indications are that capital, or, 
as Mr. Mallock calls it, " ability," has been 
the chief force in the enormous production 
of modern times. But, at any rate, it ought 
to be clear that whether or not the present 
proportion of distribution is equitable or 
inequitable, the question is not to be de- 
termined by anything save the working of 
economic law. First comes the question, 
Can land give more of what is produced to 
capital and labor? next, Can capital give 



174 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

more to land and labor ? and finally, Can 
labor give more to land and capital ? Until 
these questions are determined, it is idle 
to discuss whether each will give, or is 
morally bound to give, or can be made to 
give, more than each is giving now. Can 
one afford to relinquish from its respective 
share a substantial portion for the relief or 
enrichment of the others and still maintain 
its ability to go on doing its part as a pro- 
ducer? For it is absolutely essential — 
and here anybody may be dogmatic — that 
each one of the three producing forces 
shall be maintained in its efficiency as a 
producer. Labor's interest in the econom- 
ical welfare of capital is as real as capital's 
in that of labor. An injury to one has 
always turned out to be an injury to the 
other. If every part of a machine is essen- 
tial to the operation of every other, the 
efficiency of any one part is dependent 
upon the efficiency of all the rest. The 
integrity of each of our three producers is 
economically imperative. It is clear, there- 
fore, that the determination of labor's 
claim, like that of land and capital, is to 
be effected by the economic operation of 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 175 

economic law. There is no escape from 
such a conclusion ; for if any one of the 
proposed schemes of cooperation shall be 
adopted, its success will be wholly depen- 
dent upon the working of the three world- 
old forces in strict accordance with the 
laws which govern them. The farmer 
owns his land, supplies his necessary capi- 
tal out of his surplus — never mind now 
whence he derived it — and does his own 
work unaided. His produce is a hundred 
bushels of w T heat. He takes as his own 
every one of those bushels, but he takes 
them as landowner, capitalist, and laborer, 
— all in one. If he cared to keep books 
and credit himself as landowner, capitalist, 
and laborer, w T ith the respective shares due 
to each, he would be in a fair way to ap- 
preciate the mysteries of our industrial 
problems. The great practical truth which 
is slowly emerging from the history Indus- 
trialism is making, and from the studies of 
our political economists, seems to be this : 
that the action of none of the three pro- 
ducers should ever be hampered or checked 
in such a way as to diminish their pro- 
ductive efficacy, either by interfering with 



176 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

their freedom, or by so diminishing their 
rewards as to diminish the vigor which they 
themselves exert ; but that, on the con- 
trary, each should have its freedom and 
rewards jealously maintained and guarded, 
and the conditions most favorable to its 
exercise most scrupulously secured. " By 
such means, and by such means alone, is 
there any possibility of the national wealth 
being increased, or even preserved from 
disastrous and rapid diminution." 

This examination of the threefold indict- 
ment of civilization has thus far been con- 
ducted on economic lines. But you will 
have noticed that no prophecy has been 
uttered, and no economic solution of the 
problems involved has been so much as 
suggested. It appeared to me necessary 
to state in simple and, I hope, lucid fashion, 
the irrational character of that indictment 
as it is commonly framed. I wished com- 
pletely to separate the work of political 
economy from the task of Religion, in order 
the more clearly to set forth the powerful 
influence which Religion, expanded to the 
new needs of the new day, is destined to 
exert in determining the solution of the 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM, 177 

problems of Industrialism. It is the con- 
fusion of the offices of each which has 
brought political economy into contempt 
and Religion into distrust, not seldom into 
disrepute. Political economy will never 
be a Religion, Religion will never be polit- 
ical economy, but an identity of purpose 
as regards a part of man's salvation — that 
salvation which means having all that is 
best in a man at its best — will ever make 
them friends and allies. They are the 
brain and heart of the coming civilization. 
The one must point the way, the other 
must persuade us to take it, even if taking 
it involves sacrifices and concessions. 

It is significant that Religion has at last 
roused itself to a consciousness that it has 
a duty towards Industrialism. The vener- 
able tradition that Religion had no vital 
relation to Industrialism, that its function 
was wholly that of an alms-gatherer and 
alms - distributor, caring for the conse- 
quences of a disturbed Industrialism — 
poverty, disease, and misery — has been 
completely shattered. It lingers only in 
quarters where men are too timid to face, 
or too blind to see, the thoroughly altered 



178 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

conditions of our later day. Yet even in 
these quarters, men are vaguely aware that 
the perpetuation of old traditions are fla- 
grantly failing to satisfy the demands made 
upon them by the imperious and outspoken 
champions of the new order. They are 
not skeptical as to the truth they hold, the 
aims they pursue, but they are dimly con- 
scious that their truth is not all the truth, 
their aims are not sufficiently inclusive. 
But enterprising Religion — the Religion 
which is obsessed by the larger conception 
of salvation — is thoroughly alive to the 
fact that it has a duty towards every form 
of human movement, and has already be- 
gun to provide itself with the knowledge 
and the spirit which the fulfillment of that 
duty inexorably requires. To such an ex- 
tent has this been done that organized Re- 
ligion has now and then been betrayed 
into uttering a warning to those of its rep- 
resentatives who have forged a little ahead 
of their more conservative, not to say more 
intelligent brethren. The incident of Doc- 
tor McGlynn, complicated though it was 
with purely personal accidents, is a case in 
point His suspension and his reinstate- 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 179 

ment are significant. Frequently the com- 
plaint is uttered that the clergy no longer 
preach the Gospel of Christ, but the doc- 
trines of political economy. Our Divinity 
Schools have made provision for sociologi- 
cal training, and some of them have ele- 
vated social economics to the rank of 
scriptural exegesis and ecclesiastical his- 
tory. The institutional Church, of which 
we hear so much and are destined to hear 
more, finds a place for the study of all 
those industrial questions which touch the 
real life of man. Religion is thoroughly 
awake to something more visibly pressing 
than original sin and baptismal regenera- 
tion. There are not wanting clergymen 
who openly champion, in the name of Reli- 
gion, some of the most radical of industrial 
measures. An increasingly large amount 
of the spiritual vitality of our churches is 
every year disengaged from the technically 
religious enterprises of organized Religion 
and attached to enterprises which are not 
religious in name at all, but promise to 
mitigate the industrial and social burdens. 
Many of the best missionaries the churches 
have ever trained and sent forth are found 



180 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

to-day, not in Africa and China, nor in 
Arizona and Nevada, but in the organiza- 
tions which directly seek to secure to our 
toilers more of the concrete blessings which 
their toil has largely produced, organiza- 
tions whose field of operation is the great 
cities and the centres of industrial activity. 
It is hard to exaggerate the profound in- 
terest which Religion is disclosing in every 
movement which promises to make this 
earth fairer and the conditions of life 
sweeter to the members of that vast indus- 
trial world which, by its rapid organization 
of itself, is every year more in evidence. 
It is a signal proof of that statement which 
I made in my first lecture, that Religion, 
so far from being in a state of decay, is all 
alive with a divine purpose to make itself 
felt on fields from which it was once with- 
held or rejected. There can no longer be 
room for doubt that whatever may have 
been the interest or the attitude of Reli- 
gion in the past, she is to-day in the fore- 
front of the ranks of radicals, revolution- 
ists, visionaries, and doctrinaires, as regards 
a deep and permanent interest in indus- 
trial problems. 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. i8l 

And yet Religion was never so blamed 
as to-day for withholding her influence and 
her effort from the cause of the working- 
man. The labor unions would very likely 
deny everything which I have claimed for 
religious interest in industrial conditions. 
They do deny it They are denying it 
with bitter vehemence, and thorough sin- 
cerity. The radicals deny it, and urge, as 
a reason for deserting the churches, that 
Religion is on the side of privilege, and 
that they prefer to work for the salvation 
of man in this world to working for his 
salvation in a world to come. This ap- 
parent contradiction of our primary asser- 
tion must be explained. 

In the first place, Religion is identified 
with ecclesiasticism, and the behavior of 
the churches is naturally charged to Reli- 
gion. It must have been noted, however, 
that in these lectures Religion has been 
treated as essentially distinct from the 
churches. The churches exist for the pur- 
pose of uttering Religion in social life. 
This distinction is fundamental, and how- 
ever illicit it may appear, is radical and 
real. Now, " disbelief in Religion is for 



1 82 THE EXPANSION' OF RELIGION 

the most part intellectual, while disbelief 
in the churches is social or moral, or emo- 
tional. The one comes to a man through 
education, the other through the experi- 
ences of life. Disbelief in Religion may 
go hand in hand with conformity to a 
Church : disbelief in the churches involves 
the refusal to be identified with Religion 
as they present it, or to join in their pro- 
fession and worship. The two unbeliefs 
are generically unlike. The one is that of 
the man whose mind has outgrown the 
faith of a world with whose social order he 
is satisfied and wishes to maintain: the 
other that of the man who is dissatisfied 
with the social order in which he finds 
himself, and so comes to doubt the ideas 
or facts invoked as its sanction and basis." 
But the churches have always lagged a lit- 
tle behind the free religious spirit. They 
have the conservative caution of organiza- 
tion, and are tempted to send out scouts 
to reconnoitre and experiment, before 
throwing the great bulk of the unwieldy 
organization upon one side or the other of 
a pressing present question. Moreover, 
the churches are probably right. They 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 183 

avoid costly blunders, and even ludicrous 
mistakes, by their slow conservatism. Only 
the very impatient or the very prophetic 
will blame them for deliberated delays. 
But, at any rate, the organized churches 
are, as organizations, frequently in the rear 
of the frank championship of new causes. 
Consequently, whoever identifies Religion 
and ecclesiasticism will upbraid Religion 
for her tardy allegiance to the cause of the 
workingman. But Religion, which only im- 
perfectly utters itself through the churches, 
is always in the forefront of the battle 
waged against injustice and wrong. And 
it must be so, for Religion cherishes the 
profound belief that man and God belong 
absolutely to one another; that man, be- 
cause of that belonging, was meant to be 
perfect ; and that he cannot be perfect — 
be saved, that is — so long as he is the 
victim of injustice and w r rong. It takes 
possession of individuals and through them 
gets on the side of right and justice, when 
the churches, out of which they come and 
by which they are nurtured, lag sadly in 
the rear. The moment Religion is differ- 
entiated from the churches which it ere- 



1 84 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

ated as organs of utterance of itself, half 
the charge that Religion is on the side of 
privilege and the present social order falls 
to the ground. 

In the second place, Religion is de- 
nounced as hostile to industrial conditions 
because it does not commit itself to all the 
plans of relief which Industrialism or polit- 
ical economy have proposed. The signi- 
ficance of the long statement of the purely 
economic character of industrial problems, 
with which we started out, becomes ap- 
parent. How can Religion champion 
plans which have not received the sanction 
of political economy ? It is not her func- 
tion, she has not the requisite knowledge. 
It might turn out that the very scheme 
which she is blamed for not championing 
would, in concrete operation, injure the 
very cause she is most anxious to serve. 
Is, for example, the proved history of the 
effect of legislation touching wages so eco- 
nomically promising that Religion would 
be certain to inflict no injury upon indus- 
trial interests if she should throw all her 
weight in favor of further and radical legis- 
lation ? Is it economically so sure that 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 185 

eight hours a day would be a real boon to 
the workingman, so sure that it would not 
only result in the maintenance of his nom- 
inal wages but of his real as well, that Re- 
ligion is justified in rising up to demand 
of law-makers the enactment of the law 
which fixes eight hours as the maximum 
length of a day's toil ? Is it so demon- 
strably certain that a serious alteration of 
the proportion of the world's production 
now given labor could be inaugurated with 
perfect safety to that interdependent play 
of all the forces of production upon which 
the material welfare of the people solidly 
rests, that Religion may dare to commit 
herself to its championship? One needs 
not to be a political economist to per- 
ceive the possible folly of these industrial 
changes ; and the truest and wisest friends 
of workingmen would be the first to hesi- 
tate radically to alter our present economic 
arrangements with no more knowledge of 
the consequences of such an alteration 
than is possessed to-day by any set or 
school of economic theorists. Each of the 
schemes of Industrialism may sometime 
prove the highest economic wisdom ; no 



1 86 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

one of them is beyond reasonable doubt 
to-day. But it is the unwillingness of Re- 
ligion to identify herself with industrial 
programmes which explains the charge 
so frequently urged against Religion that 
she is against Industrialism itself. It is 
the business of Religion to side boldly 
and vigorously with the wronged, the op- 
pressed, — there can be no doubt of that ; 
but, first of all, it is necessary to ascer- 
tain by methods more trustworthy than 
vehement pity and pitiable vehemence who 
are the wronged and oppressed, and where 
lies the cause of the wrong and oppres- 
sion. And that was never easy, save in 
those instances where the wrong was so 
indubitably visible and so unerringly lo- 
cated that righting it has followed hard 
upon detecting it. 

Discriminating between Religion and 
ecclesiasticism, between sympathy with In- 
dustrialism and adherence to industrial 
programmes, we shall have no room for 
a doubt that Religion's interest in labor's 
complaint is keen and enterprising. Nor 
ought we to doubt that her influence is 
powerful when we attend to the real busi- 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 187 

ness of Religion in its relation to Indus- 
trialism, which we now proceed to do. 

We have already seen how real is the 
distinction between the functions of Reli- 
gion and political economy, but those 
functions will never be exercised fruitfully 
for the welfare of mankind save as they 
work together, mutually influencing one 
another at every step. It is the business 
of Religion to create an atmosphere of 
love and trust in which the rightful claims 
of antagonized, but not antagonistic, inter- 
ests may be calmly and dispassionately 
presented; an atmosphere of justice and 
righteousness, in the pure sunlight of 
which the richest advantage looks poor and 
mean beside the slightest injustice which 
secures it ; an atmosphere of brotherhood 
in which the selfish powers of might shall 
hesitate and falter and fail to do any deed 
which crushes out of a brother's life that 
ideal of salvation — having all that is best 
in a man at its best — which it is the duty 
of man to evoke and nurture and refine 
in every man born on this earth. For 
it is, first of all, a condition of dislike and 
hard suspicion which makes the settlement 



1 88 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

of industrial disturbances so difficult to 
effect. No strike has ever been caused by 
the purely economical question of wages, 
hours, or distribution alone ; that is an 
element, powerful and capital; but into 
every strike there enter, as almost equally 
powerful elements, the angry or sad dis- 
like of the workingman, the hard, suspi- 
cious dread of the employer. It is these 
which defeat all attempts to resolve the 
differences in debate, these which destroy 
the possibility even of the compromise 
which is better than war when no princi- 
ple of morality is surrendered, these which 
breed the conscienceless and stupid pride 
which finally accepts ruin, misery, and 
social disaster, rather than accept anything 
less than unconditional capitulation. Long 
after it is clear that an increase of wages 
is economically safe for the employer, or a 
return at the old rates is economically best 
for the workman, the angry, defiant con- 
testants prolong the costly struggle, when 
nothing divides them save the passion 
which, unlike the economical element, is 
absolutely within their personal control. 
It is becoming as clear as a proposition in 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 189 

geometry, that no industrial problem into 
which the personality of man enters as an 
element will ever be satisfactorily or peace- 
fully solved, unless there is love enough to 
create the patience, forbearance, consider- 
ation, and conciliation necessary to hear 
and understand the truth, and to create 
the conviction that a difference of opinion 
touching an industrial disturbance is con- 
sistent with an honest determination to 
extricate from tangled meshes the truth 
which shall make all clear. Political econ- 
omy, which for years has depreciated Reli- 
gion, is now prompt to own her incompa- 
rable influence in fields whereon she was 
once regarded as an impotent intruder. 
The Bishop of Durham brought to a 
happy end the great miners' strike ; but he 
did not do it as a bishop (in spite of his 
ecclesiastical office, perhaps), nor did he 
do it because he was the superior, in eco- 
nomic knowledge, of all those who had 
tried their hand at a settlement and had 
failed ; he did it, could do it, because he 
brought to the task so much of genial 
love, of willingness to believe in the integ- 
rity of motive on the part of employers and 



190 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

employed, that he could melt out of them 
their bitter anger and their stubborn pride 
and so make a way over which the shining 
feet of peace could walk in safety. That 
was Religion, the influence, not of a great 
Church dignitary, but of a man full of the 
love of Christ, and therefore able to teach 
his brothers the lesson of love and trust. 
What a Giffen or a Marshall or a Rogers 
could not do was done by one who would 
humbly sit at their feet as masters of the 
science of economics ; and he did it by the 
power of Christian love. That achieve- 
ment of Religion outranks any most defi- 
nitive championship of any of the especial 
propositions which labor has laid down as 
essential to the material welfare of work- 
ingmen. The scornful rejection by the 
parties in interest of the good offices of 
Religion in creating a kindly spirit, as 
impotent good nature, is irrational. Lu- 
brication is not power, nor is it machinery, 
but without it the machine is motionless 
or tears itself in pieces. " Love one an- 
other," which is the social watchword of 
Religion, is worth as much to Industrialism 
as the announcement and verification of 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 191 

its most precious economical truth. And 
it is the profound and passionate convic- 
tion of this truth, it is the hope which has 
been created by what it has already 
achieved, that arms Religion to-day with 
the invincible belief that she has a minis- 
try of healing to Industrialism which no- 
thing else can give. That belief keeps her 
patient and unresentful when she is bit- 
terly denounced by labor for not coming 
bodily and boldly over to its programme 
— silent and undiscouraged when radicals 
in her own ranks upbraid her for timidity 
and cowardice. Industrialism has faith in 
the justice of its cause, hope in its final 
triumph. Religion is begging it to add 
the charity, which, though it suffereth 
long, is kind, thinketh no evil, and can 
rejoice in the truth even when the truth 
declares itself to be something other than 
was hoped or believed. Political economy 
will deserve Carlyle's fretful characteriza- 
tion of it as " the dismal science " until it 
thoroughly accepts love as the sole medium 
through which to speak. But more than 
love is needed. Love can degenerate into 
an easy good nature, which, like the tender 



192 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

mercies of the wicked, is cruel. Religion 
must also create an atmosphere of justice 
and righteousness in which the richest 
advantage will look poor and mean beside 
the slightest injustice which secured it. 
The idea that justice and righteousness 
are entities, that they can be handled, dis- 
tributed, and dealt in like commodities, 
finds support nowhere in Religion, morals, 
or government. Justice and righteousness 
are known to us only as they appear in the 
person of a just and righteous God and of 
just and righteous men. The appeal to 
justice is not to an abstraction, but to a 
person. If the cry of oppressed men for 
justice does not enter into the ears of a 
just God or of just men, it is as if it had 
never been uttered. Now " Religion is 
the power which makes and keeps men 
just, because it believes in a just God. 
The character of the God believed in de- 
termines the character which men are to 
achieve. This explains why the progress, 
the forward movement of the world, has 
been worked by good persons — persons 
made just by their religious beliefs; no- 
tice that I do not say ecclesiastical alle- 






RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 193 

giances." Therefore Religion, instead of 
giving herself wholly or even mainly to 
the task of establishing justice by enact- 
ment, has thrown herself into the work of 
making men just. In the world of Indus- 
trialism, more just and righteous men are 
needed, in order that justice and right- 
eousness may have their way in settling 
the incessant disputes and differences 
which seem inseparable from the working 
of a vast and complex machinery of pro- 
duction. They are necessary, because not 
infrequently arrangements and agreements, 
which were believed by both parties to them 
would work exact justice, unexpectedly 
turn out to be flagrantly unjust, harsh, or 
burdensome to one of them. In such a 
situation there is no redress, short of costly 
violence and equally costly rupture, save 
as a high sense of justice lives in the 
breasts of all — employers or employed. 
The sight of the employer, imperiled by 
his agreement, is as dreadful in the eyes of 
employees who love justice and righteous- 
ness, as is the sight of starving employees 
in the eyes of the employer who would 
rather be right than be rich. Religion 



194 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

has expanded to the recognition of this 
truth, and holds it with the firm tenacity 
with which organized Religion keeps its 
fundamental creeds. This energized de- 
votion to the task of leading men up to 
the idea of a just and righteous God, and, 
through that idea, to personal obedience 
to Him, is the preeminent characteristic of 
Religion to-day. Men full of the passion 
for justice are always men to whom the 
action which promises to enrich them by 
its injustice is abhorrent. No considera- 
tions of economical rectitude ever silence 
the voice of moral rectitude when men are 
determined that their material gain shall 
not be the measure of their moral loss. 
And so Religion, awakened to her splen- 
did chance, expanded to take that chance, 
is resolutely, confidently, vigorously plead- 
ing for the prime necessity of just and 
righteous men as one of the essential con- 
ditions of industrial peace and prosperity. 
And Religion is right. The irreligious 
and the radicals may despise her for what 
the one calls her powerlessness, may taunt 
her with what the other calls her cowardly 
timidity. No matter. Her head at last is 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 195 

clear, her heart warm, and she is doing to- 
day a far nobler and truer work than when 
of old she literally baptized nations in a 
day. Not only shall the just live by their 
faith in justice, they shall also impart life 
to all who are on the lookout for justice. 

In the third place, Religion is creating 
an atmosphere of brotherhood in which the 
selfish powers of might hesitate, falter, and 
fail to do any deed which crushes out of 
a brother's life that ideal of salvation, hav- 
ing all that is best in a man at its best, 
which it is the duty of all of us to evoke, 
nurture, and refine. The tendency of 
naked political economy is to produce 
separations among men by subtly teach- 
ing them to look at one another as imper- 
sonal parts of a huge machine. The em- 
ployer is perpetually tempted to look upon 
his employees as he does upon his looms, 
— impersonal producers of so many com- 
modities. The loom and its attendant can 
turn out so many yards of textiles per day. 
The improvement of the loom, and the 
improvement in manual skill of the man 
who tends it, are so indissolubly bound up 
together in the employers mind that he 



196 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

can as easily think of the man as a ma- 
chine as to think of him as a living soul. 
That is the snare into which all too many 
of our employers fall. How much can the 
workman produce ? is the first and last 
question, and the man is lost in the produc- 
tive intricacies of the machine. The work- 
man, on the other hand, is equally tempted 
to regard his employer as no more than a 
bank on which he draws. " How much 
can I make him pay ? " is his first and last 
question, and the man is hidden beneath 
his ability to honor the drafts labor makes 
upon him. There can be no brotherhood 
between a machine and a depository; 
brotherhood exists between persons, and 
the more acute the consciousness of per- 
sonality, and the more sensitive the re- 
sponse of man to man, the stronger will 
be the sense of brotherhood, and the more 
vital the feeling of responsibility for the 
welfare of each. The prevalence of the 
pragmatic spirit, this loss of the man in 
the maze of the machinery which he guides, 
has cost Industrialism dear. It has hard- 
ened the heart of many a manufacturing 
Pharaoh to say, " The people are idle, 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 197 

therefore they complain ! " and has caused 
workingmen to turn against some mod- 
ern Moses, who has led them into the 
wilderness of concession and concilia- 
tion, that he might bring them into the 
promised land of industrial freedom and 
social chances. It has produced the deep- 
seated, irrational, destructive feeling that 
there is not, nor can be, a sameness of 
interests, a sameness of purposes and 
ideals. And this feeling has negatived 
many a demonstration of the economic 
fact that labor, land, and capital stand or 
fall together finally. But Religion, which 
has been working recently along the lines 
of the new anthropology — that anthro- 
pology of which we spoke in our second 
lecture — is insisting upon the necessity of 
brotherly union in the interest of the com- 
monweal. " That is no true success," she 
confidently asserts, " which is content with 
the achievement of a material product" 
Man is worth more than anything he 
makes; and if the making of anything 
means the deterioration of the man who 
makes it, it were better for civilization that 
it had never been made. A really reli- 



198 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

gious employer — that is, one who believes 
in salvation as we have defined it — will 
not be content to see his wealth increase 
if the human beings who cooperate with 
him to create it are, by the conditions of 
their toil, deprived of every chance to 
develop and discipline themselves into 
something other than cogs on the great 
wheel of Industrialism. He will not only 
see that an improvement of men is an im- 
provement of product; he will also see 
that every man, who is lifted out of the 
hopelessness of servitude into the hopeful- 
ness of work, is a distinct addition to the 
causes which are to fashion human soci- 
ety into a true City of God, and that every 
man who is changed from a " hand " into 
a person, with all the chances of personal- 
ity guarded, is a fresh contribution to the 
stability, order, and happiness of the world. 
He will in practice conform to his belief 
that he and his workmen are brothers, 
owing one another duties of generosity, 
kindness, care, and not simply the bare, 
hard duty of justice. The curse which 
has long rested upon Industrialism is the 
curse of unsympathetic, unintelligent, and 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM, 199 

unnatural relations between all the parties 
who create Industrialism. Those relations 
are unsympathetic, because neither em- 
ployer nor employed has cared for each 
other's ideals of life, but only for each 
other's ability to produce some material 
commodity ; unintelligent, because each 
has failed to see that the higher the ideal 
of life, the loftier will be the sense of 
responsibility for each others permanent 
and symmetrical welfare ; and unnatural, 
because the whole history of mankind is 
witness to a struggle to fit men to dwell 
with one another in a society which shall 
furnish all with chances, and protect all 
in their rights to those chances. To lift 
that curse, to teach the world the precious- 
ness of life, and so to lead men to set life 
above anything which living men produce, 
promptly to put herself upon the side of 
any movement, agency, enterprise, which 
is demonstrably enriching life or demon- 
strably promises to do so, is the task Reli- 
gion in these last days has set herself to 
perform. And her evident purpose never 
to rest until her task is finished, her grow- 
ing willingness to see value in every enter- 



200 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

prise which aims to lift life out of the mire 
of wickedness, misery, stupidity, clumsi- 
ness, ignorance, or mistake, is the evidence 
of her large expansion. 

It is this characteristic of Religion which 
discloses her nearness to the as yet in- 
complete federation of labor. The trades 
unions began in unconscious selfishness. 
They sought to gain and retain certain 
advantages for themselves alone, not sel- 
dom securing their ends at a heavy cost to 
workmen outside their crafts. They were 
bent on compassing very limited results. 
But long ago their narrow vision widened 
till it embraced every toiler in any depart- 
ment of industry. The federation of labor 
means the consolidation of all the inter- 
ests, and all the powers and resources, of 
those who toil, for the purpose of safe- 
guarding their rights. It is a noble dream, 
for the realization of which no lover of 
men will fail to hope, for it is only another 
form of the working of the spirit of Him 
who came that men " might have life and 
have it more abundantly," however incom- 
pletely the membership of the unions to 
be federated have conceived the nature of 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 201 

that life to be. The essential selfishness 
of the unions is to be, nay, is fast being, 
destroyed by the unselfishness of federa- 
tion. And when federation is completed, 
when all the rights of all the toilers have 
been safeguarded to the farther verge of 
organization's ability to protect, when the 
cries for justice are hushed in the full pos- 
session of power, then shall surely come 
the acute consciousness that man for his 
salvation needs something more than to 
possess his rights : he needs to be guided, 
lifted, chastened by a Divine Power ; needs 
something, nay, some one, to breed in him 
self-respect, self-control, reverence, compas- 
sion, purity, and love, without which all 
his material gains will count for naught. 
It is the certainty that this truth will 
finally be grasped by Industrialism, which 
is leading Religion to watch eagerly for 
any signs that, here and there, the labor 
unions are catching glimpses of it. The 
contention of later labor utterances that 
not simply higher wages and a larger 
share of production for the laborer is 
wanted, but a better chance to develop 
and discipline and refine himself, and that 



202 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

higher wages and shorter hours are merely 
the conditions of that development, marks 
an advance over the earlier demands. It 
means a faint but true suspicion that what 
the man becomes is more important than 
what he possesses, and that what he pos- 
sesses is important at all only as it minis- 
ters to quality of life. That is the working 
of Religion, imperfect, feeble, impercepti- 
ble to the ecclesiastical mind that cannot 
see over its wall of historic tradition, but 
still Religion, because it is a tendency 
towards man's salvation. If they did but 
know it, the aims of Industrialism and of 
organized Religion are every year ap- 
proaching identity, however divergent be 
their methods. And the more Religion 
expands to embrace every human interest, 
the more its sympathies reach generously 
and warmly out to every struggle man is 
making to free himself from the machine- 
quality industrial relations tend to fasten 
on him ; and, on the other hand, the more 
Industrialism opens to receive the full 
rounded doctrine of the nature of man, — 
a being capable of spiritual and social and 
intellectual development, — the nearer will 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 203 

be their approach to one another, and the 
more feasible their complete union. The 
federation of labor is imperfect Religion, 
just as a good deal of our ecclesiasticism 
is imperfect Religion. Their concurrent 
and symmetrical expansion will be the be- 
ginning of their happy and fruitful unity ; 
their unity the pledge and prophecy of 
their union. Labor unionists are begin- 
ning to perceive this truth. One or two 
of their wisest leaders have already more 
than hinted that until the labor unions 
have added the religious element, success 
will delay its coming; and the services 
which Religion, in the persons of its no- 
blest sons, has already rendered Industrial- 
ism, justifies this intimation. 

I should like to close my lecture by 
briefly pointing to one unhappy feature of 
modern Industrialism in regard to which I 
am unaware that any special notice has 
been taken. With the rise of our great 
manufacturing establishments, there has 
been an enormous increase in the employ- 
ment of women as toilers by the side of 
men. Our factories of various sorts are 
crowded with them, from the age of six- 



204 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

teen upwards. Their superior deftness, 
not to say conscientiousness, has proved 
them, in certain branches of productive 
enterprise, the equal of men ; perhaps, eco- 
nomically, their superiors, if we take into 
account their lower wages. Dating from 
the Civil War, women have invaded more 
and more those places which theretofore 
had been traditionally reserved to men, 
until to-day there is scarcely an occupation, 
outside of those in which crude physical 
strength is an essential, which does not 
count women in the ranks of its workers. 
That this innovation has brought women 
a larger freedom, and a more self-respect- 
ing independence, cannot be doubted, nor 
that it has increased the amount of pro- 
duction and wealth. Moreover, the eco- 
nomical disturbance which it was prophe- 
sied would ensue has failed to occur. We 
have reconciled ourselves to it socially, 
commercially, economically. Unchival- 
rous man is willing, after all, that woman 
should do his work. But it cannot be 
long before we shall have to pay the cost 
of it ; and that cost will be an enfeebled 
feminine physique, disclosing itself in neu- 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 205 

rotic diseases, in hypersensitiveness, and 
in functional disturbances of many and 
alarming varieties. The deterioration of 
the stock, to use an objectionable phrase, 
is eventually inevitable, even if its shadows 
have not already fallen upon the coming 
generations. For the holy office of mater- 
nity, the present position of woman in In- 
dustrialism, the tasks laid upon her, the 
hours and conditions of toil, are the worst 
preparation conceivable. One need be 
neither a biologist nor a physician to fore- 
see what the effect upon posterity must 
be of an arrangement which permits, or 
compels, so large a proportion of the 
women of the nation to do work for which 
they are fitted neither by physique nor 
temperament, nor by their intended des- 
tiny as the possible childbearers of the 
world, to perform. All the economic advan- 
tages of the present system shrivel into 
nothingness in comparison with the fun- 
damental damage done to woman by her 
unnatural struggle to secure those advan- 
tages. Her competition with man in sev- 
eral departments of industry is injurious 
to her and to man alike. Not to speak 



206 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

of the waning power of that chivalry which 
is of inestimable value in giving tone to 
the social and domestic relations of the 
sexes, there is a serious blow given the 
sacred institution of marriage, and, by con- 
sequence, to the family. Anything which 
lowers the general estimate of marriage 
and the family is a distinct social wrong. 
Not yet — but in a future less remote than 
the public unconsciousness of the evil 
wrought by the modern place of woman 
in Industrialism would lead one to expect 
— we shall set ourselves radically to reform 
the culpably careless arrangement which 
has increased our wealth, but has corre- 
spondingly decreased reverence for mar- 
riage, by lessening its social necessity, and 
has weakened many of the bonds which 
bind the family together and preserve it 
as the most powerfully beneficent social 
force in civilization. If it was Religion, 
the Religion of Jesus, which originally 
lifted woman from a condition of ignoble 
servitude, and too often something worse, 
and set her in the respect, the chastened 
affection, and the chivalrous reverence of 
the world, it may turn out that Religion, 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 207 

seeking to have all that is best in a human 
being at its best, is to be the power that 
shall once more bring her back to a more 
intelligent, rational, and natural position 
in the economy of civilization. 



v. 

RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 

Raphael Aben Ezra dwells upon the 
bad temper Hypatia betrayed if he ven- 
tured to ask her, when making her appeals 
to universal experience, how she proved 
that the combined folly of all fools re- 
sults in wisdom. It is some form of that 
question which occurs to all of us when 
we are presented with any plan to place in 
the custody and under the direction of all 
men what, when under the direction and 
in the custody of individuals, fails to pro- 
duce the results we all desire. We proba- 
bly should all turn monarchists if we could 
find the king who knew as much as all of 
us and a little more, and was as good as 
the best of us and a little better. But 
though the world has been on the lookout 
for this sort of king, and has known 
Arthur the Good and Peter the Great, 
Arthur's goodness has not been enough 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 209 

without Peter's greatness, nor Peter's 
greatness without Arthur's goodness, to 
reconcile humanity to the idea that roy- 
alty is divine. It will be divine when the 
Divine King appears and has His divinity 
of goodness and greatness recognized ; 
not till then. On the other hand, we 
should all be converted to thorough-going 
democracy — to which at present we are 
not converted — if the demos acting as 
demos made fewer mistakes and achieved 
more wisdom than history assures us is 
true. It is one of the great commonplaces 
of history that the failure of the noblest 
speculative theories and the most wisely 
elaborated programmes for the improve- 
ment of human society have been wrecked 
upon the rocks of human selfishness in 
one or many of the forms of wrong- 
ness which selfishness perennially assumes. 
Until this century, nearly all the ideal 
societies which philosophers and poets 
have described as realized in actual cir- 
cumstances, have been judiciously located 
upon islands ; and Mr. Richard Whiting's 
rediscovery of Pitcairn's Island, as set forth 
in his too little noticed book, is a skillful 



2IO THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

employment of the old device, to make a 
speculative theory work well by exhibiting 
it in the framework of a distant and un- 
known — or at least unnoticed — civiliza- 
tion, in which Individualism could be repre- 
sented as acting as it should. Between the 
ideal beauty of the perfect society and the 
iron facts of existing Individualism, there 
has been from the beginning of civiliza- 
tion an uninterrupted warfare, with varying 
fortunes to either of the combatants. The 
ground lost by the one to the other in one 
century is recovered in the next. Mon- 
archical supremacy in one age yields to 
democracy in the next. It looks like a 
perpetual seesaw, this alternating battle 
between Society, pictured as it should be, 
and Individualism as it is; and the only 
pleasant feature of it is the unfailing hope 
which shines through it that in a future, 
as certain as the past, such an adjustment 
of Society and Individualism shall be 
evolved as will cause Society to do only 
justice and Individualism to perform all 
its duties. For Society recognizes that it 
must reckon with Individualism, and In- 
dividualism perceives that Society is prac- 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 211 

tically itself. They so fundamentally be- 
long to and are so necessary to each other, 
that any proposition to extirpate either 
has failure written upon its face. That, I 
think, is the truest characterization that 
can be made of the present agitation for a 
radical reorganization of all Society. So- 
cialism, as defined by the extreme left, 
will never be incorporated into living gov- 
ernment, not because its arguments will 
fail to convince us of its abstract justice or 
beneficence, but because it must perpet- 
ually meet the " wild living intellect " of 
the individual. And pure Individualism 
can never become the working law of 
Society because it must meet the solid re- 
sistance of instinctive organization. This 
statement is fundamental in all I shall 
have to say in to-night's lecture ; and in 
the attempt to state the relation of Reli- 
gion to Socialism, I shall be guided by 
the elementary truth that Religion can be 
on the side, exclusively, of neither Socialism 
nor Individualism, because from the be- 
ginning Religion has taught Socialism, 
while, at the same time, insisting upon 
Individualism, and because it is this fea- 



212 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

ture of it which makes it Religion, and 
not political philosophy nor political econ- 
omy. Jesus may have been the first and 
the great socialist, but He was also the 
great individualist. He had a doctrine of 
Society and a doctrine of the individual; 
and these two doctrines, running down 
through Christian civilization, have sur- 
vived in undiminished vitality unto this 
day. An exposition of these will make 
clear this eternal relation to both Social- 
ism and Individualism — especially to So- 
cialism, which for nearly half a century, 
though its voice has been heard all round 
the world for not more than a score of 
years, has been exploiting a social revolu- 
tion beside w T hich the change from the 
ancient world to feudalism, and again from 
feudalism to the existing order of free con- 
tract, are insignificant. 

It will be helpful to point out how 
strenuously Religion insists upon the sepa- 
rateness of the individual. It is its nature 
to do so, for Religion is primarily a mat- 
ter between God and a personal soul. So 
long as men regard themselves as related 
to humanity, as the lump of coal to the 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 213 

vein from which it is mined, not as the 
soldier to his comrade and to the captain 
whom both obey, there is no chance of 
their appreciating the part each man plays 
in the evolution of the race. To believe 
that one is no more than a helpless frag- 
ment of the nation, or of the class to which 
one belongs, is to stifle every generous 
ambition, and to dull, if not destroy, the 
sense of personal responsibility for not 
only character but for influence upon the 
forces which are working in mankind. 
And so Religion cries to each of us, " Re- 
alize your own separateness, stand up for 
your character as an individual, recognize 
your own power of self-determination, 
resent and reject that conception of the 
individual which represents him simply as 
a cog on the great wheel of humanity 
turned helplessly by an unknown power ; 
and develop and cling to that conception 
of yourself which gives you the power to 
elect, select, choose, and reject." One of 
the finest of Hebraic phrases is, " Come 
and let us reason together, saith the 
Lord ; " for it is the splendid representa- 
tion of Deity entering into rational con- 



214 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

verse with a rational, self-determining 
being. Christianity is preeminently, char- 
acteristically, eager for the growth and 
vigor of the idea of Individualism realized 
in a virile, personal will. It bids man 
be candid about his individual attitudes 
towards everything which can conceivably 
touch with shaping hands any legitimate 
human interest, to be " either cold or hot," 
never "lukewarm." It charges him to 
retain possession of his mind and con- 
science, even when ecclesiasticism would 
have him give them away. It exhorts him 
to look clean through every institutional 
arrangement to which he consents, or by 
which he is coerced, and to behold the im- 
mediate relation which he sustains to God 
and truth and justice. " The soul that 
sinneth, it" and not some other soul, 
" shall die ; " the soul that obeyeth and 
loveth truth and justice, it, and not some 
other soul, shall live. All through the his- 
tory of vigorous Religion runs the strong 
thread of the Individualism which is the 
assertion of the total separateness of every 
being born into this world. Without this 
individual consciousness, there is no strong, 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 21 5 

clear sense of personal responsibility, and 
men will throw upon society, upon class, 
upon a general set of conditions, upon 
ancestry, ill health or good health, upon 
inherited tendencies — upon anything — 
the guilt of acts whose consequences are 
only evil. Where no person is responsible 
for personal character nor for social condi- 
tions, there is no responsibility, and men 
rage against civilization as the impersonal, 
yet real, creator of the evils which weigh 
them down. The bad cry out, " We are 
delivered to do all these abominations ; " 
the good moan and lament their birth into 
a world of hopeless misery, hopeless sin. 
The complete absence of Individualism is 
fatalism, and fate may be lodged anywhere, 
in secondary causes, or in a single self- 
originating cause, named, described, ex- 
plained, as each of us may take a fancy, — 
but always fate, the power which shapes us 
to its will, irrespective of anything we do. 
Half of being " born again," in the phrase 
of Jesus, is the recovery of the conscious- 
ness of separate self-hood. That recovery 
is the beginning of a true moral educa- 
tion, which, again, is a rationalized and 



2l6 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

refined form of what science has called 
" the struggle for existence " in the world 
of organic life. The instinct of self-pres- 
ervation and self-assertion, which works as 
thoroughly in a baby as in a philosopher, 
is altogether unconscious, and placidly ex- 
ists concurrently with the conviction that 
we are the passive instruments of another's 
power. But the interpretation of the in- 
stinct of self-preservation as the prophecy 
of conscious personality, as the rudiment- 
ary form of what, by reflection, may and 
ought to become the power of self-deter- 
mination, is the work of Religion, because 
it insists that each of us was meant to live 
in a relation of conscious dependence 
upon God. That is Religion, for the reli- 
gious man is he whose conception of God 
is such that it reacts immediately upon 
his total personality. This is preemi- 
nently true of Christianity. Its doctrine 
of the Incarnation is summed up in the 
statement that Christ sought to bring man 
to God through the sublime illustration 
of an intensely individual human life in 
complete union with God. Jesus is al- 
ways exhibiting the necessity of this con- 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 217 

sciousness and fact of individual separate- 
ness. " I lay down my life of myself, no 
man taketh it from me. I have power to 
lay it down, and power to take it again. 
What shall a man give in exchange for 
his soul ? " that is, himself realized as a self- 
determining personality ! " What shall it 
profit a man if he gain the whole world 
and lose his own soul ? " Christianity has 
been truest to itself when it has coura- 
geously and consistently stood upon this 
fact. It has been visibly at the height of 
its power when it has laid the emphasis of 
its teaching upon the duty which one owes 
himself as a distinct and separate person- 
ality and upon this duty as a natural and 
inalienable fact. " Our being, with its 
faculties, mind and body, is a fact not 
admitting of question, all things being of 
necessity referred to it, not it to other 
things. If I may not assume that I exist, 
and in a particular way — that is, with a 
particular mental constitution — I have 
nothing to speculate about, and had better 
leave speculation alone. Such as I am, it 
is my all ; this is my essential standpoint 
and must be taken for granted ; otherwise 



218 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

thought is but an idle amusement not 
worth the trouble. There is no medium 
between using my faculties as I have them 
and flinging myself upon the external 
world, according to the random impulse 
of the moment, as spray upon the surface 
of the waves, and simply forgetting that 
I am. I am what I am, or I am nothing. 
If I do not use myself, I have no other 
self to use. My only business is to ascer- 
tain what I am in order to put it to use. 
It is enough for the value and authority 
of any function which I possess to pro- 
nounce that it is natural." This clear, 
firm, conscious conviction of self-separate- 
ness or personality is the door through 
which all responsibility passes. Anything 
which threatens to weaken or destroy it is 
fundamentally false. I am, of course, well 
aware how differently speculative philoso- 
phy has interpreted this fact, how variously 
its origin and limits have been defined, 
but all our great speculative thinkers — if 
one who is not a scholar may venture to 
speak of them — are agreed that personal- 
ity is not only a fact, but the only fact 
which is capital in the spiritual life of 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 219 

man on the human side. Religion is both 
on the side of Individualism as a fact 
inalienable from humanity, and on the 
side of whatever develops and refines its 
operation. Through it man comes into 
his intended relation to God and into his 
intended relation to Society. I have in- 
sisted upon this natural fact, as reinforced 
and revitalized by Religion, because it has 
an indestructible relation to any form of 
Socialism which has been, or ever can be, 
proposed, because it lays bare one of the 
primary foundation stones upon which the 
structure of Society can alone solidly rest; 
and because, finally, its exaggerations and 
distortions are not to be made a warrant 
for denying its value or its necessity. Our 
first proposition, therefore, is that Reli- 
gion is on the side of whatever emphasizes 
the self-separateness of the individual. 
The importance of this proposition will 
appear further on. 

In the second place, Religion is on the 
side of organization by the great stress it 
lays upon the duty of loyalty to superiority, 
and upon the duty of protection to in- 
feriority. These two duties are rooted in 



220 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

the stubborn fact of the native inequalities 
of men. If we were all born equal, there 
w 7 ould be no need of loyalty to superiority, 
no need of protection to inferiority. But 
as we all know, the differences among men 
are so wide as respects a dozen powers, 
that the moment the most rudimentary 
society emerges, it is largely a reflection of 
the effect of these differences ; and the 
question which tormented the earliest, tor- 
ments the latest Society: " What shall be 
the attitude of the less favored to the most 
favored, and what shall be the position of 
native superiority to native inferiority ? " 
The first of these questions is as important 
as the second in affecting the well-being of 
that total Society which is necessarily made 
up of unequally gifted human beings. The 
progress of the world has been attained 
largely through competent leadership, in- 
telligently and loyally followed. When we 
say that the history of civilization is the 
history of its greatest men, we are only 
half right; but we are half right. The 
great man, with the power of leadership, 
is the coronation of the widely diffused in- 
telligence, virtue, and struggle of the na- 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 221 

tion. He takes up into himself the lesser 
leaderships, and the great total body of 
hopes and activities to which each indi- 
vidual contributes, and gives them direc- 
tion and force. His greatness, his power 
to secure beneficent results — liberty, 
chances, justice, rights, possession, know- 
ledge — is inexorably dependent upon the 
intelligent and continuous support of those 
to whom these results are a boon. His 
contribution of ability is always prodigious, 
— prescience, wisdom, courage, skill — but 
there must be a bulk of ability of the same 
sort, though of inferior degree, resident in 
the people upon which his superior ability 
plays. In war the strategist, engineer, 
commander ; in politics the statesman ; in 
industrial arts the inventor and the user 
of the invention the inventor invents ; in 
Religion the thinker, the saint ; these are 
the leaders by whose leadership obediently 
followed the blessings of victory, govern- 
ment, increased production, and spiritual 
truth descend upon Society. " He that 
receiveth the righteous man in the name 
of a righteous man shall receive a right- 
eous man's reward." That is the voice of 



222 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

Religion urging the necessity of loyalty to 
proved superiority, not unintelligently nor 
with any slightest diminution of the con- 
sciousness of separate self-hood, but rather 
with the loyalty that perceives in the act 
of obedience the exercise of individual rea- 
son and wisdom. Now it is clear that this 
loyalty, to be thoroughly effective, must in 
some way be the exercise of an association 
which, while binding men together, unites 
them as independent persons, not as pas- 
sive instruments. It is Religion which 
furnishes the type of such association, be- 
cause, dimly in its lowest forms and dis- 
tinctly in its highest, it asserts the duty of 
obedience to God. It sometimes calls Him 
the Supreme Being, and sometimes Father, 
but always it requires that every man shall 
intelligently yield his personal will to that 
of God, yet ever retain the consciousness 
of distinct personality. In all Religions, 
but of course preeminently in the highest, 
the well-being of man is represented as 
hanging upon his obedience to his Creator, 
individual perfection ever issuing from the 
personal union of man with God. The 
leadership of God, not the omnipotence of 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 223 

God, is the true idea of the relation of man 
and his Creator. But once men perceived 
that by putting themselves under leader- 
ship, and not simply by resting passive 
under power, they were in the way of life, 
their endeavor became energetic to organ- 
ize their loyalty, and to add to individual 
obedience corporate obedience. This is 
the genesis of the Church, which is ideally 
a brotherhood, that total brotherhood ex- 
hibiting, as an organization, the corporate 
loyalty which lives in the individual, and 
receiving, as an organization, the corporate 
blessings which descend upon the individ- 
ual. " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God," 
is addressed to the individual, and the spir- 
itual value of such a love is forever certi- 
fied to the individual. But to this is added, 
" and thy neighbor as thyself ; " immedi- 
ately the social duty of man appears, not 
as rooted in something diverse from that 
in which duty to one's self finds its sanc- 
tion, but as growing out of obedience to 
God. Part of that social duty, and the 
part we have in hand just now, is that 
which is owed by inferiority to superiority. 
To the man who can lead me, guide me, 



224 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

inform me, teach me the path of safety 
and welfare, I owe loyalty because it is my 
duty to make the most of myself, and I 
can make the most of myself only as I am 
loyal to him. But more than this, I can 
help my neighbor, my brother, my fellow- 
man, to make the most of himself only as 
I consent to be led by superiority. Even 
if I am willing to forego the advantages to 
myself of such loyalty, I have no right 
by disloyalty to diminish like advantages 
to my brother. The moment obedience to 
competent leadership is demonstrated to 
be fruitful in valuable result, obedience 
becomes a duty. Individualism is for the 
sake of the highest order of association, 
and the highest order of association thus 
far known, is, in part, the result of an in- 
telligent subordination of the individual to 
proved superiority. The " divine right of 
kings" and the " omnipotence of Parlia- 
ment " are the historical distortions of this 
fundamental truth of Religion and organ- 
ized Society. Tyrannies of every sort-: — 
oppressions, hereditary rights, intrenched 
injustices, a whole multitude of wrongs 
- — are the irrational exaggerations of this 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 22$ 

elemental truth. But, for all that, it is as 
evident now as it has always been in the 
history of civilization that this truth is 
essential — I will not say to any sort of 
progress — but to progress of the noblest 
order. Religion without loyalty to God is 
unthinkable. Progress without loyalty to 
superiority is impossible. The two ideas 
are so indissolubly bound together that 
vigorous Religion and continuous progress 
have always gone together in human his- 
tory. Religion dies before progress decays 
in the national life. 

But the duty of protection to inferiority 
is equally fundamental. Leadership is un- 
der bonds to furnish its followers with all 
the blessings leadership can secure. Now, 
the effect of leadership is to bring out 
into visible, concrete conditions the natu- 
ral inequality of human beings. It empha- 
sizes the differences in physical strength, 
intellectual power, in daring ingenuity and 
enterprise, which are common everywhere. 
It reveals, as by some powerful alchemy, 
the inequalities into which we are born, 
sets them in circumstances which attract 
attention, creates measures of value, deter- 



226 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

mines rank and reward, and originates 
contrasts which inevitably tend to become 
fixed and final. As a consequence, the 
leadership which begins with the noblest 
purposes to secure advantages to the whole 
social body is under subtle and fierce temp- 
tation to furnish by attaching to itself, for 
its own use and as its own possession, such 
a share of those advantages as it never 
dreamed of when power was put into its 
hands. It follows, therefore, that the duty 
of inferiority to be loyal to superiority is 
absolutely conditioned upon the duty of 
superiority to protect inferiority. " Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself " is the 
formal sanction of leadership. " He that 
would be greatest among you, let him be 
your servant," is the noblest description of 
its function. Leadership for leadership's 
sake is tyranny and finally suicide. If it 
forgets its sole sanction, if it betrays its 
trust, the result is, first, a fixed inequality 
of chances for classes and individuals, ever 
producing contrasts of wealth and poverty, 
culture and ignorance, power and helpless- 
ness, which appal the mind and w r ring the 
heart; and, second, a revolutionary move- 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 227 

ment which may blindly overturn Society 
at enormous loss to every interest con- 
cerned, and strive to build up another so- 
ciety just as maleficent, because founded 
upon the opposite principle of disobedience 
to superiority. The first of these results 
is bountifully illustrated in history. Lead- 
ership in some form false to itself, that is, 
recreant to the obligations it incurs by the 
very fact of being entrusted with power, 
is responsible for almost all the disasters 
which have overtaken the world since it 
had anything like an organized Society. 
Leadership has been the greatest curse 
and the greatest blessing the race has ever 
known, but the curse is the perversion of 
the blessing ; and the only known force to 
persuade or to compel leadership to dis- 
charge its sacred trust is Religion, which 
consecrates leadership to the unceasing 
task of exercising itself to secure equality 
of chance to inequality of endowment. 
Religion forever broods over superiority, 
and urges, through the conscience, through 
compassion, justice and love, the indestruc- 
tible claims of inferiority to the best pro- 
tection superiority can afford. 



228 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

These, then, are the elemental proposi- 
tions of Religion touching the everlasting 
conflict between Individualism and Social- 
ism. First, Religion is pledged, by its 
doctrine of the personal relation of every 
soul to God, to help on all those forces 
which are emphasizing and refining the 
sense of separate self-hood. Second, it is 
equally pledged, by its doctrine of human 
brotherhood, to further the exercise of 
every leadership which produces, or tends 
to produce, the welfare of the great total 
body of Society. These two propositions 
describe the means of the moral education 
of the individual and a bond of union for 
the race. They exhibit the necessity of 
preserving a balance in the working of the 
law of life, the law which provides for self- 
preservation and self-assertion, and for the 
intelligent subordination of these to the 
organization which we call Society. Such 
a statement runs the risk of being branded 
as a cowardly compromise by those who 
hotly demand the sanction of Religion for 
pure unrestricted Individualism on the one 
side, or for thoroughgoing Socialism upon 
the other. But these propositions are 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 22<) 

simply the formulation of the law of all 
life in any of its developments. We find 
them powerfully at work in every Society 
of which record remains, and in undimin- 
ished vigor, though with varying fortunes, 
in the marvelous social changes which are 
developing under our eyes to-day. " The 
balance which sustains our solar system 
between the central force drawing all into 
one and the centrifugal velocity which rep- 
resents at every point the tendency of each 
body to continue its own isolated course, 
is a symbol of the spiritual law of society 
formulated by Religion, but rooted in hu- 
manity itself." 

I have dared to dwell so long upon 
these two propositions and their indisso- 
luble relations because one or the other of 
them is likely to be obscured according as 
we accept or reject that scheme of social 
revolution now known in a vague way as 
Socialism. The attitude of Religion to- 
wards it ought to be determined by intel- 
ligent acceptance of the two propositions 
we have named. The individualist is 
wrong, as against Socialism, when he stands 
up for unrestricted free contract and com- 



230 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

petition ; the socialist is wrong, as against 
Individualism, when he champions the 
scheme that reduces the sense of independ- 
ent personality and dulls the incentive to 
fullest self-development. 

Before attempting to define Socialism, it 
is necessary to describe briefly the causes 
which have made it the formidable or 
hopeful, but always the important and in- 
teresting, movement of the end of the cen- 
tury. Apparently it is a modern growth 
or discovery, but really it dates back to 
the days when the military organization of 
society was slowly broken up and the pro- 
cess of political emancipation and enfran- 
chisement was inaugurated. The French 
Revolution is the spectacular exhibition of 
how far this process had extended at the 
close of the last century in much of Euro- 
pean society. It was an astounding reve- 
lation of the strength and extent of the 
forces which had been at work in the 
constitution of Society, a revelation which 
startled radicals and conservatives alike. 
It did not create those forces, it is doubt- 
ful if it appreciably strengthened them ; 
but, as nothing had ever done before, it 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 23 1 

displayed them, put them on record, and 
bade Society henceforth remember their 
existence. And since the French Revo- 
lution an almost uninterrupted process of 
extending powers and privileges to classes 
once excluded from them has characterized 
modern Society. Politically, no Society in 
Europe, not even Germany, is to-day more 
than a reminiscence of what it was at the 
beginning of the century. Every govern- 
ment has yielded something to democracy, 
regarded either as a theoretically sound 
abstraction, as in France, or as an institu- 
tion which practically suits the purposes 
of Society, as in England and America. 1 
The power of the people has increased 
since 1832 with every decade, and is in- 
creasing still. Political rights are so uni- 
versal that, with no more worlds to con- 
quer, female suffrage becomes rational, 
and all the rights and privileges which 
the people politically have acquired are 
subtractions from the possessions of the 
privileged classes. But the extension of 
political rights has been accompanied by 
an equally significant, though not equally 

1 French Traits, William G. Brownell. 



232 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

great, admittance of the people to educa- 
tional, industrial, and social opportunities. 
The number of highly, not to say academ- 
ically, educated persons in Europe and 
America is estimated to be tenfold more 
to-day than fifty years ago in proportion to 
the population. Entrance to the univer- 
sities and technical schools of a high grade 
is more costly, but more free ; and the 
chance of education once open almost ex- 
clusively to the well-to-do or to young men 
who proposed to enter the sacred but not 
lucrative ministry, is now practically open 
to any one who is willing to undergo the 
self-denial which is and always will be 
involved. The public school system has 
been not only extended but lifted. Laws 
have been enacted in certain communities 
making attendance upon the schools com- 
pulsory. Equally significant is the history 
of industrial legislation. It is all, without 
a break, on the side of labor. It would be 
difficult — I have found it impossible — to 
name a single act of legislation frankly 
intended to regulate industrial relations 
which is not protective, or intended to 
be protective, of the rights and chances 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 233 

of the workingman. All the demands of 
labor upon legislation have not been 
granted, but none of the requests of capital 
for relief has been incorporated into stat- 
ute. Any advantage capital has secured 
has been by indirection. The encroach- 
ments of the people upon the privileges of 
the powerful classes by the peaceful meth- 
ods of legislation in the last fifty years 
would, if exhibited in bulk, look enormous. 
Those of us whose interests are not directly 
affected, fail to appreciate the radical and 
wide extent of the changes in laws regu- 
lating the rights of employers on the one 
hand, and the duties of employed upon 
the other, which have been wrought 
throughout the whole industrial world; 
but those whose lives and fortunes are 
immediately touched are aware that the 
changes directly resulting from machinery 
and inventions are matched by changes 
in statutory regulation of the conditions 
under which that machinery shall be 
worked. And finally, the social improve- 
ment of the people has kept pace with 
their political, educational, and industrial 
betterment. The larger leisure, the op- 



234 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

portunity for culture, the easy and safe 
depositing of savings, the plentifulness 
and cheapness of many articles of luxury, 
— all these have made their mark upon 
the general social condition. The un- 
stayed tendency of modern Society is to- 
wards an equalization of chances, to an 
equal distribution of rights and privileges. 
But this tendency which has already 
wrought the social changes we have briefly 
enumerated, this tendency which is so dis- 
tinct and powerful that it cannot be mis- 
taken, has suggested the thought that by 
the operation of law, enacted by the State, 
there may be created an absolute equality 
of every human being as regards means, 
rights, opportunities, labor, and enjoyment. 
It is the historical fact of an unprece- 
dented advance towards such an equality 
in the last one hundred years, without the 
aid of state action, except in isolated stat- 
utes, and not the speculative philosophy of 
Marx and his more recent disciples, which 
has made Socialism the hope and dread 
which it is to-day. The successful past 
has prophesied a still more successful 
future through the employment of an 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 235 

agency, existing from the beginning of 
civilization, but never utilized. The utili- 
zation of the State to produce absolute 
equality of opportunity and means for 
every human being is the programme of 
real, thoroughgoing Socialism. I must 
not be criticised for giving a definition of 
Socialism which many socialists would 
repudiate, nor be accused of ignorance of 
the many varieties of Socialism which 
are vigorously urging their different pro- 
grammes upon our consideration. The 
historical fact is that Socialism, as a prin- 
ciple of organization for the reconstruction 
of society, is comparatively simple. Com- 
plexity arises from the chaos of methods 
which different schools of socialists have 
agreed to adopt, and from an unconscious 
unwillingness to accept all the logical con- 
sequences of the characteristic and cardi- 
nal principles of true Socialism. And I 
shall not allow myself to be betrayed into 
attempting the endless task of elucidating 
the relations of Religion to any or all of 
the milder and less logical forms of Social- 
ism, which bear to the real, the undiluted, 
article about the same significance that 



236 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

the " domestic cat bears to the royal Ben- 
gal tiger." Socialism is in strict principle 
the proposal so to reorganize human So- 
ciety by state enactment that there shall 
be an absolute statutory equality of oppor- 
tunity and possession for every member of 
Society. That this definition is not un- 
just to Socialism is apparent by contrast- 
ing it with that of one of its foremost and 
frankest champions. " Socialism," he says, 
" denies individual private property, and 
affirms that Society, organized as the State, 
should own all wealth, direct all labor, and 
compel the equal distribution of all pro- 
duce." That we understand; it is frank, 
lucid, self-consistent. " When Proudhon 
was brought before the French magistrate 
in 1848 and asked, ' What is Socialism?' 
he answered, ' Every aspiration towards 
the amelioration of Society.'" That is 
generous, but it is not frank nor lucid nor 
self-consistent. It is applicable to the 
great total body of human struggle from 
the beginning, and no more describes So- 
cialism than it does the Salvation Army. 
Similarly Doctor Barry says, " Socialism, I 
take it, must mean the emphasizing and 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 237 

cultivating to a predominant power all the 
socializing forces — all the forces, that is, 
which represent mans social nature and 
assert the sovereignty of human Society. " 
Apart from the fatal effect of bringing into 
the body of the definition the very thing 
to be defined as part of the definition, the 
word means nothing at all as regards So- 
cialism, because civilization from the be- 
ginning, and not simply in the last fifty 
years, has been struggling to cultivate all 
the forces which represent mans social 
nature. Social evolution, as distinguished 
from Socialism, began the moment two or 
more men, forced to live near to and de- 
pend upon one another, found it was not 
an easy matter, and set to work, uncon- 
sciously to be sure, to invent a modus 
vivendi. The history of civilization is the 
record of a blind or reasoned effort to 
establish Society by cultivating all the 
forces which represent man's social na- 
ture. Cain and Abel, the Israelites and 
the Canaanites, the Puritans and the In- 
dians, were all involved in that effort, one 
as much as the other. Socialism, on the 
contrary, has just celebrated its sixtieth 



238 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

birthday. So Doctor Westcott — whose 
ability is unquestioned, and of whose ser- 
vices in behalf of the English miners I 
have already spoken in a previous lecture 
— writes : " Socialism has been discredited 
by its connection with many extravagant 
and revolutionary schemes, but it is a term 
which needs to be claimed for nobler uses. 
It has no affinity with any forms of vio- 
lence or confiscation, or class selfishness 
or financial arrangement. I shall there- 
fore venture to employ it apart from its 
historical associations as describing a theory 
of life, and not only as a theory of econo- 
mics. In this sense Socialism is the oppo- 
site of Individualism, and it is by contrast 
with Individualism that the true charac- 
ter of Socialism can be described. Indi- 
vidualism and Socialism correspond with 
opposite views of humanity. Individual- 
ism regards humanity as made up of dis- 
connected or warring atoms. Socialism 
regards it as an organic whole, a vital 
unity formed by the combination of con- 
tributory members mutually interdepend- 
ent. It follows that Socialism differs from 
Individualism both in method and aim. 






RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 239 

The method of Socialism is cooperation, 
the method of Individualism is competi- 
tion. The one regards man as working 
with man for a common end, the other re- 
gards man as working against man for 
private gain. The aim of Socialism is the 
fulfillment of service ; the aim of Individ- 
ualism is the attainment of some personal 
advantage, riches, or place, or fame. So- 
cialism seeks such an organization of life 
as shall secure to every one the most com- 
plete development of his powers. Indi- 
vidualism seeks primarily the satisfaction 
of the particular wants of each one in the 
hope that the pursuit of private interest 
will, in the end, secure public welfare." 
This definition of Socialism is very beau- 
tiful, and if it were true would win our 
instant and cordial assent. But it is not 
Socialism — the historical fact — which 
Doctor Westcott eloquently champions ; 
it is a conception of it which he himself 
has made, independent of hard, undeni- 
able facts, in answer to a profound sympa- 
thy with those upon whom heaviest fall 
the evils of an exaggerated, unregulated 
Individualism. Without being aware of 



240 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

it, he would extirpate the Individualism 
absolutely necessary to the creation of the 
sort of Socialism he so attractively de- 
scribes. Socialism does have affinity with 
forms of confiscation and the most impor- 
tant conceivable financial arrangements. 
To say that a scheme which proposes to 
do away with final fee simple in land, and 
to distribute with exact equality the total 
produce of the world's energy, has no 
affinity with confiscation or financial ar- 
rangements is to turn both language and 
thought upside down and downside up. 
No. Socialism, frank, philosophical, his- 
torical, is none of these mild, pared-down, 
and worked-over theories; it is the straight- 
forward doctrine, no private property, and 
state ownership, state management, and 
state distribution. It is w r ell, now and 
then, to call things by their right names. 

The two forms which Socialism assumes 
are Communism and Collectivism, the for- 
mer being fast superseded by the latter. 
Isolated communistic associations have be- 
come familiar to us in America, with a 
history beautiful like that of Brook Farm, 
which was worth all it cost in money and 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 24 1 

disappointment, since it gave us the im- 
mortal " Blithedale Romance," or hideous 
like that of Mormonism, or fantastic like 
that of the Shakers ; but each of them has 
proved powerless as a social force, save 
as their members have turned away, cut 
themselves loose, from the very Society 
they longed to reconstruct Communism is 
like those perfectly working models which 
utterly break down when realized in the 
massive engines they were fashioned to 
prove the practicableness of. The seques- 
tered company, knit together by homoge- 
neous beliefs and similarity of spirit, creat- 
ing its own state, so to speak, is able to 
exhibit the graces of Communism ; but the 
great, restless, heterogeneous mass of men, 
out in the world, long ago perceived that 
Socialism would never find in Commun- 
ism the highway which leads to equality of 
opportunity and possession, and they have 
discredited it by abandoning it to those 
who timidly shrink from following social- 
istic principle to its ultimate conclusion. 
Communism is equality by voluntary con- 
sent, erected into fact by the free action 
of all contributors and consequent sharers; 



242 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

but Collectivism is another thing. It 
means, not simply the abolition of private 
property by a free compact, as Commun- 
ism preaches, but, by capturing the gov- 
ernment, the imposition of itself by legis- 
lation upon the nation. The State is to 
own all material, all tools, all products, to 
own and direct all systems of transporta- 
tion and communication ; is to manage 
directly all financial, industrial, and agri- 
cultural enterprises ; and to determine 
every economic question which may arise ; 
guaranteeing to all citizens an equal share 
of all the benefits of every sort which may 
result. Collectivism rejects as final or 
logical, every attempt which, under the 
name of Socialism, seeks a readjustment 
of industry and administration by arbitra- 
tion or private compact. This readjust- 
ment must be incorporated into national 
law, and must be enough thoroughgoing 
not to stop short of merging the State 
into an organized Commonwealth, absolute 
owner of everything there is to own. This 
Socialism has its philosophers, orators, 
writers, and agitators, and is animated by 
a deep, earnest, almost prophetic convic- 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 243 

tion that the regeneration of the world 
hangs helplessly upon its universal adop- 
tion. 

It is time to determine, if we can, what 
is, not what ought to be, the relation of 
Religion to Socialism as thus defined by 
itself. Religion, as we saw, stands for per- 
sonality, for the assertion and refinement 
of self-separateness and for the duty of self- 
development. That is cardinal in Religion, 
because it seeks to bring the individual, as 
an individual, into relation with God, to 
elicit personal love, personal obedience, per- 
sonal righteousness. It follows, therefore, 
that Religion is opposed to Socialism, if 
the effect of Socialism is to reduce what 
is most characteristically individual and to 
sacrifice it upon the altar of organization. 
But is that the effect ? Manifestly, there 
is no answer to that question, because 
there is nowhere, and never has been out- 
side of books, Socialism realized. Appar- 
ently the effect of Socialism upon the 
individual is an affair of pure prophecy, 
always an uncertain, and frequently an 
unheeded, voice. But those isolated illus- 
trations of voluntary Communism, which 



244 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

are, thus far, the only examples of concrete 
Socialism to which anything like a rational 
appeal can be made, seem to show what 
that effect would be. Brook Farm broke 
in pieces because the organization was not 
powerful enough to subjugate the person- 
ality of its members, or their individual 
vigor was too much for the organization. 
Its theoretical excellence preserved a sem- 
blance of success long after the impossi- 
bleness of such an arrangement was as 
clear to its founders as were the waters of 
the brook which gave their farm its name. 
They foresaw the certainty of defeat in 
the splendid Individualism which, in an- 
other frame, was to lay literature and poli- 
tics and philosophy under imperishable 
obligations. If it be urged that a com- 
munistic experiment, tried by men like 
Hawthorne, Ripley, Dana, and Dwight, 
was doomed to fail, it may in turn be 
asked whether the success of Socialism is 
dependent at all upon the exclusion of all 
strong, enterprising Individualism from 
the field of its operation — and Social- 
ism would be the first to deny so dismal 
a condition. The pot was shattered by 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 245 

the growing oak ; oaks always break pots ; 
always have, always will. On the other 
hand, those communistic communities 
which have survived illustrate " a monot- 
onous, dull, unprogressive existence, the 
prosperity of peasants, with a peasant's 
hope, a peasant's aim." There is no great 
uplift for the individual. He sinks down 
to the level of the general mediocrity. 
Genius is dangerous or discredited, educa- 
tion is reduced to a strict utilitarianism. 
There is no art, no poetry, no outlook, 
no vision, and ambition is dead. A safe, 
unenterprising, material prosperity of low 
degree is all that the oldest and most 
successful of our communistic communi- 
ties can show as the social result of their 
theory reduced to practice. It is depress- 
ing, repressing, the social influence of such 
a community upon the vigorous Individu- 
alism which produces leadership, heroism, 
invention, and illumination of life. There 
is no place for recreation, little for emo- 
tion, none at all for that illimitable hope- 
fulness which is the source of almost 
everything that lifts life up out of the 
dullness which the constant attrition of 



246 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

care, toil, sorrow, and loss everlastingly 
tends to create. 

This criticism of Socialism is neither 
theoretical nor prophetic ; it is strictly his- 
torical, and it shows that Socialism, so far 
as it destroys Individualism, is opposed 
by Religion. It fails to conserve the 
consciousness of self-separateness which is 
essential to salvation ; as Religion con- 
ceives it — having all that is best in a 
man at its best. If, then, Religion is on 
the side of a regulated and refined Indi- 
vidualism, it cannot be on the side of that 
thoroughgoing Socialism which, under the 
form of Collectivism, proposes by legisla- 
tion to reorganize society nationally upon 
the basis of absolute equality of opportu- 
nity and wealth. Notice I say " it cannot 
be." Organized Religion may be on its 
side, may possibly champion it as the 
formulation of the aims it has all along 
been cherishing, but organized Religion 
has been on the wrong side too often in 
the history of mankind for us ever to regard 
its position as necessarily infallible. The 
severest test to which Socialism can be sub- 
mitted is its ability to counteract success- 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 247 

fully its powerful tendency to extirpate the 
spontaneity of personality. Tested on a 
small scale, as in the case of the Shakers, 
the Icarians of Iowa, the Rappists, the 
Oneida Community, and forgotten Flor- 
ence, Socialism has dismally failed, and 
failed simply because either too strong per- 
sonalities cracked and split it, or too weak 
personalities reduced it to a dull, dreary, 
repulsive, organized mediocrity. Religion 
is unwilling, nay, is unable, to give itself 
to Socialism, not at all because it does 
not acutely sympathize with its sincere and 
noble aim, but because Socialism funda- 
mentally contradicts a cardinal principle of 
Religion — the principle of the self-sepa- 
rateness of man as essential to his complete 
development Godward and manward both. 
That contradiction is fatal. It is an im- 
pregnable argument against that thorough- 
going Socialism with which alone we are 
concerned. One need not so much as refer 
to the vulgar identification of Socialism 
with atheism and agnosticism, or even 
with the immoralities incident to the abo- 
lition of the family and a community of 
wives, in order to show how irreconcilable 



248 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

Collectivism and Christianity are. For 
apart from the fact that unbelief and wick- 
edness have no more to do with Socialism 
than with democracy or monarchism, and 
therefore will not be considered by the 
impartial student of its elemental princi- 
ple, it is enough, and more than enough, 
to discredit Socialism in the eyes of real 
Religion that it would inevitably overturn 
one of the eternal foundations upon which 
Religion solidly, eternally rests. For as 
the disappearance of vigorous personality 
is necessary to the establishment and main- 
tenance of Socialism, so the perpetual 
presence of personality is necessary to the 
vitality of Religion. 

But this is not all. You will remember 
that we found Religion standing for the 
duty of loyalty to leadership and of protec- 
tion to inferiority, and we now proceed to 
inquire how far Socialism squares with 
this elemental duty. I find in Socialism 
no place for leadership, but only for power, 
and power lodged in a vague organization. 
Society must be directed, but how can it 
be directed without a director? and how 
can there be a director when all oppor- 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 249 

tunity for the rise of a director has been 
removed — rigidly, completely removed ? 
Genius becomes an impudent intrusion, a 
dangerous quality, in a society which looks 
upon the first beginnings of superiority as 
hostile to that absolute equality of every 
human being as regards opportunity and 
wealth, upon which Society is to be se- 
curely based. Genius is inequality of op- 
portunity, because it is competent of itself 
to open new paths of enterprise and to 
behold new visions of truth. But what 
must Socialism do ? Either it must fol- 
low genius — that is, leadership — and so 
give to Individualism an irregular power, 
that is, an exceptional opportunity, which 
theoretically and practically would be the 
end of Socialism as a principle, or it must 
suppress genius, so closing up the path of 
development and causing the vision of new 
truth to vanish away. One or the other. 
But God has so ordered the deep instincts 
of humanity that they can be interpreted, 
regulated, and refined only through leader- 
ship ; blessing follows obedience, safety 
issues from obedience ; likewise enlighten- 
ment, inspiration, and the vision without 



250 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

which " the people perish." Whatever 
view, theologically, men may take of the 
Incarnation, its marvelous power is best 
explained by the insistence of Jesus that 
His disciples should follow Him, should 
accept Him as the true interpretation of 
the nature of God and the destiny of man. 
The Divine leadership and the human 
obedience to it constitute the real history 
of Christianity, and remain the source of 
its power. It was not an arbitrary crea- 
tion, a novel arrangement. It was the 
perfect exhibition of processes of human 
development as old as Society itself. It 
built itself up upon the inalienable, ele- 
mental qualities of human nature. It was 
God's great declaration that by and through 
obedience to leadership, — the leadership 
thoroughly, divinely competent, and the 
obedience thoroughly intelligent, — the 
salvation of humanity alone could be se- 
cured. The vigor and fruitfulness of Chris- 
tianity spring not from councils, agree- 
ments, order, organizations of any sort 
whatever, but from loyalty to the leader- 
ship of Jesus. The divine method of the 
education and development of the race is 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 251 

illustrated in the heart of Africa and in the 
heart of America, only in America the 
leadership is perfect (in the incomparable 
words of the Bible, " The Captain of our 
Salvation is perfect through suffering"), 
and the obedience is both more rational and 
implicit, because largely the inherited habit 
of centuries of Christian faith. But at any 
rate, the Incarnation, which is the supreme 
and central power of Christianity — in- 
creasingly so — testifies that salvation — 
having all that is best in a man at its best 
— comes through obedience to leadership. 
Socialism makes no provision for anything 
of the kind. Absolute equality of oppor- 
tunity and wealth excludes it, rigorously, 
pitilessly excludes it, and so immense 
chances for development are unsuspected 
and unused. That is why I think Social- 
ism can never be the basis of human So- 
ciety. It contradicts a natural instinct 
which Religion has so marvelously devel- 
oped and directed, that it is essential to 
the existence of any sort of human associa- 
tion that can be called Society. To deny 
the right of that instinct to utter itself, to 
shut it completely out from the play of all 



252 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

other social forces and yet look for a 
Society in which all that is best in man is 
at its best, and all that is best in Society is 
at its best, is like trying to obtain a product 
in arithmetic with a single factor. 

Again, Socialism makes no provision for 
the duty of protection which strength owes 
weakness. It is not foolish enough to 
claim that under its universal sway there 
shall be no weakness, no inferiority. It 
sees with clear eyes that men will continue 
to be born with flagrant inequalities of 
powers and gifts for fighting the battle of 
life. But it protests that when it shall 
have remade the world, there will be no 
battle of life, because weakness shall have 
as good a chance as strength. But weak- 
ness needs a better chance than strength, 
needs it because it is weakness, and what 
the Society that now exists is trying to do 
is to secure to weakness that better chance. 
Religion has developed compassion to the 
point of energetic, explicit demand that 
superiority shall stand aside that inferior- 
ity may secure the opportunity which, 
unaided, it is powerless to seize, yet pa- 
thetically needs. We find the modern 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 253 

movement in Religion simply unintelligi- 
ble unless we perceive its direction toward 
guarding the rights of those who formally 
have an equal chance with the strong, yet 
really are on grossly unequal terms. An 
adjustment can never protect the weak, 
an arrangement can never put men upon 
equality of footing, no legislation under 
heaven can make " chances equal by mak- 
ing them uniform," and uniformity is all 
that even Socialism dreams of establishing. 
Inflexible uniformity of chances, with no 
provision for protecting the inferiority 
bound to exist forever, is no better than 
inequality of chances with a perpetual in- 
sistence upon, and a growing provision 
for, the protection of the weak against the 
strong. Nay, it is not so good ; for, with 
the expansion of Religion to perceive and 
meet the duties which arise out of the ap- 
palling contrasts of the modern world, and 
with the indubitable and really undoubted 
accumulations of compassionate justice in 
the heart of Society directed by economical 
wisdom, one by one — as fast as is, per- 
haps, good for us — the old injustices fall 
and the weak find protection and protec- 



254 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

tors. If the goal toward which our social 
evolution is peacefully moving is ever 
reached, it will be found to be, not the 
Socialism w r hose programme I have tried 
to-night to be fair to, but something in- 
finitely better, a Society in which Religion, 
enlarged for all its new and nobler duties, 
shall sacredly guard the rights, refine and 
regulate the exaggerations, of Individual- 
ism, provide competent leaderships for in- 
telligent obediences, and exact from supe- 
riority a scrupulous and tender protection 
for every form of inferiority humanity 
betrays — a Society which shall exhibit 
throughout its complicated structure the 
perfect working of that social truth which 
St. Paul has finely phrased, " We that are 
strong ought to bear the infirmities of the 
weak." 

Doubtless the criticism has already been 
passed upon this lecture, " Why has it not 
discussed Socialism in terms of its own 
political economy ? Why has it been silent 
upon the cardinal questions of private 
ownership of land, of private capital, of 
private production ? " My answer must be 
that I am not a political economist ; that 






RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 255 

I confess my incompetence adequately to 
discuss the economic aspects of Socialism. 
A certain intellectual temper, unwilling to 
accept second-hand, and even third-hand, 
expositions of social economics, and un- 
able to find, after prolonged and careful 
study of the literature of Socialism, any uni- 
versally accepted, or at all demonstratively 
established, economic truths as the basis 
of Socialism, is inclined to test it by its 
conformity to those fundamental facts of 
humanity which have persisted in all the 
social constitutions that have ever been. 
Man himself is more than a match for his 
own political economy. In war it looks to- 
day as if man had contrived death-dealing 
engines so dreadful that soon no soldiers 
will be found to face them. And it may 
be that when men intelligently appreciate 
what Collectivism means to humanity, not 
merely economically, but spiritually, they 
will shrink back from it in reasonable 
alarm. For humanity by nature is in- 
dividual, by nature loves leadership; by 
nature, when enlightened by Religion, is 
on the side of weakness. 

I should be sorry to create the impres- 



256 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

sion that Religion has no deep and tender 
sympathy with the social conditions which 
have given the programme of Socialism 
the interest it possesses for all thoughtful 
men. The havoc unregulated Individual- 
ism has caused, and is causing Society, is 
dreadful. It cannot long be tolerated. It 
is not tolerated. For all the changes in 
the direction of securing a more substan- 
tial and a more intelligent equality of 
chances for men of every occupation, which 
the last fifty years have wrought, are enor- 
mous. History, not contemporaneous ob- 
servation only, is necessary to a just appre- 
ciation of the distance Society has traveled 
along the road which leads from oppres- 
sion to freedom, from harsh condition to 
gentle condition. And the beneficent 
movement has not ceased ; nor will, until 
strength has conceded all it can with safety 
to itself as one of the supporting pillars 
of the social organization. Religion is 
behind it and beneath it, — Religion ex- 
panded to meet the duties which are rooted 
in all of human life, individual and corpo- 
rate. Religion is the inspiration of every 
proposition that looks towards human wel- 



RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 257 

fare, and has the right to claim the credit 
of creating all the social forces which are 
working for the commonweal, though she 
may hold aloof from many of the forms 
through which those forces work. And, 
if I may venture to quote the book which 
has proved a wedge to cleave, as well as a 
bond to unite, let me set down these words 
of Mr. Kidd : " It is seen that the process 
of social development which has been tak- 
ing place, and which is still in progress in 
our Western Civilization, is not the pro- 
duct of the intellect, but that the motive 
force behind it has its seat and origin in 
that fund of altruistic feeling with which 
our civilization is equipped, and that this 
altruistic development, and the deepening 
and softening of character which has ac- 
companied it, are the direct and peculiar 
product of the religious system on which 
our civilization is founded." These are 
wise words. The expansion of Religion 
precedes and creates the altruism without 
which every plan to raise man in the social 
scale is doomed to irretrievable failure. 



VI. 

ORGANIZED RELIGION. 

Not long ago one of our most distin- 
guished artists, after an unbroken absten- 
tion of nearly thirty years, attended divine 
service at one of our large churches. So 
unusual an event could not fail to make a 
deep impression upon his mind, and what 
he had seen and felt became, in the even- 
ing, the subject of his familiar, unreserved 
conversation. He said that the feeling 
which was strongest, as he watched the 
reverent behavior of the multitude, volun- 
tarily assembled, was that humanity must 
have some one to adore, some one lifted 
clean above all that we know of one an- 
other, and holding the secrets and desti- 
nies of life in his intelligent and loving 
keeping. Then, as he noted the ordered 
beauty of the service, he felt how imper- 
ishably necessary is some form of ritual as 
the vehicle of this instinctive adoration. 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 259 

And finally, he said that to his thinking 
it must be true that the sermon (which 
very likely was no better than the average 
one heard from our pulpits), boldly ad- 
dressed to the conscience, must inevitably 
help to make men ashamed of their sins, 
and to create a wish to live nobler lives, — 
that, indeed, it had that effect upon him. 
This is not common testimony. It is the 
expression of a thoroughly candid and 
unprejudiced opinion regarding Religion, 
uttering itself in worship and prophecy, by 
one who came to Religion with a freshness 
untouched by custom. That spectacle of 
Religion set in the frame of public worship 
was a surprise. It was a revelation of the 
fact that there is a great human instinct 
which is to-day, as truly as in any past age, 
interpreting prayer and praise, and minis- 
try to the conscience, as a rational exercise 
of the human spirit. 

The artist rests his case confidently upon 
the existence in man of a love of the beau- 
tiful. He seldom stops to ask whether 
this instinctive love of beauty is rational. 
He never questions its reality in himself 
or in his fellows ; and his imagination, 



260 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

penetrating into the mysteries of life and 
of the world, always seeing events, ideas, 
and things, as pictures, sets in the sensible 
form of beauty what his spiritual vision 
has beheld. His canvas, marble, song, or 
symphony, is organized beauty. It is the 
evidence of things not seen, the proof of 
their reality. It is the everlasting and im- 
pregnable demonstration of the living love 
of the invisible which is an inalienable 
ingredient of humanity. A cracked vase 
dug from Greek earth, untouched for two 
thousand years, is worth more than a bond 
of the Boston and Albany Railroad, but 
the actuary of the Mutual Life Insurance 
Company cannot tell us why. The cost 
of a Van Dyke would build a commodious 
asylum for the poor, but payment for the 
Van Dyke, while the asylum goes unbuilt, 
is wholly defensible. George Peabody, 
Cardinal Newman, and Corot, make an im- 
pression upon us different from that made 
by Watt, Stephenson, and Mr. Edison, but 
it is not less distinct or deep. Education, 
Religion and art, which have no visible 
foundations, are as real in humanity, as are 
force, locomotion, and communication in 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 26 1 

the world. Education is the name given 
the process of imparting information and 
of disciplining the mind, the knowing and 
the knowing how to know. The school, the 
university, the library, are education organ- 
ized. The schools use many faulty methods, 
the universities contain much dead wood, 
the libraries hundreds of books opaque or 
discredited. Yet library, university, and 
school stand justified by all their legiti- 
mate children. Art is both the report, 
and the creative process, of beauty. The 
schools and museums and galleries are art 
organized. The art-schools suffer from the 
hard tyranny of precedent and convention, 
extolled and exalted by the practitioners 
of technique, frequently smoothing down 
a vigorous originality to the correctness 
of a harmless mediocrity. The museums 
gather by purchase sometimes, by gift 
many times, the work of men's hands, but 
not the caught visions of their imagina- 
tions. The big galleries easily bear this 
burden of inartistic possession because of 
their splendid wealth in solid beauty of 
color and form ; the little ones are fre- 
quently crushed by it. But both school 



262 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

and museum, spite of their flagrant defects, 
have won recognition from both artists and 
people. They reinforce and refine the 
general love of beauty, they awaken and 
direct the artist's slumbering soul, and they 
reveal the wonders of a new heaven and a 
new earth in which dwelleth beauty. Their 
imperfectness is recognized, their failure to 
produce all the results which their institu- 
tion and the cost of their maintenance lead 
us to hope, is admitted ; and yet, if art is 
to be something more than a vague sen- 
timent, uttering itself in happy-go-lucky 
performances, and vainly struggling to ex- 
press contemporary ideas, these schools of 
training, and these museums which exhibit 
the creations of the past, must be main- 
tained. Let us grant that the art schools 
are frequently their own enemies, that the 
museums are treasuring, among the no- 
blest works of the human imagination, 
the whimsical products of an unregulated 
fancy, none the less they are the powerful 
influences and instruments of that art-in- 
stinct which occupies the total body of the 
people. Without them, no one knows, and 
there is no knowing, whither our aesthetic 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 263 

taste would drift, to what depths it would 
sink. They are to be valued for their pur- 
pose, and for their finest achievements, 
even at the moment when we are most 
acutely dissatisfied or unsatisfied with their 
work in specific direction. Our artists 
and lovers of beauty would be guilty of 
gross folly, and of a destructive enmity to 
the development of art, if they should re- 
nounce the schools and museums on the 
ground of their failure to be perfect. 

These commonplace observations may 
serve to introduce the subject of our last 
lecture, — the claims of organized Religion 
upon the allegiance of the people. Thus 
far in our treatment of our general subject 
we have had our eyes upon the Religion 
which is living both without and within 
the churches, but I own that it was with 
the deliberated intention of finally present- 
ing the cause of organized Religion that 
that special method of dealing with Reli- 
gion was adopted. Theoretically, it is easy 
to find Religion outside of organization, 
and, practically, it is not hard to find it 
there, if we are spiritually alert. But the 
plain fact is that for the most part, in the 



264 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

past and in the present, Religion is to be 
found inside of organization. Popularly it 
will be always judged by the spirit of the 
organization through which it utters itself. 
Much as a considerable number of us 
would like to see it disowning organization, 
much as others of us would be glad to 
have it reduce its organization to the scanty 
and loose agreements of general society, 
abolishing tests and conditions of every 
sort, making rites and ceremonies the 
spontaneous expression of a momentary 
impulse, we are to see nothing of the kind. 
Indeed, I should not be surprised if the 
uneconomic, the spiritually disastrous, and 
the theologically impotent, result of easy 
sectarianism shall turn our intelligent 
attention towards the necessity of more 
compact and unified organization. The 
perfect Church on this earth is a dream. 
Reduce its creed and polity to the precise 
requirements of John and Jane, and Jane 
will have her doubts about John. The 
" glorious Church, not having spot or wrin- 
kle or any such thing," is the Church of 
the "first born written in heaven," not 
these communions, jealous, wrangling, im- 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 265 

perfect, which we know so well on earth. 
Only the thoroughgoing ecclesiast, Catho- 
lic or liberal, ever expects the coming of 
an organization which shall satisfy all the 
needs of all men, and is willing to go on 
with the unending process of adjustment, 
as if perfection could ever reside in the 
framework and not in the spirit. A mu- 
seum in which every picture is perfect and 
every marble faultless will never be. A 
church whose doctrinal structure is with- 
out flaw, and whose ritual is absolutely 
adequate for the general need, has never 
stood upon this earth, and never will. 
Forever we shall be pained by some out- 
break of narrowness, by some jar upon a 
sensitive ear, and by some repression of a 
generous ardor. Forever we shall find our 
separate ecclesiasticisms failing to minister 
fully to our deepest hunger, to our pas- 
sionate wish to hear the full rounded doc- 
trine of man and God. We all sympathize 
with one another when we try to set forth 
symmetrically the distinguishing marks of 
the church of our affection and find them 
unsatisfactory. The unended creed revi- 
sions, the perpetual tinkering with canons, 



266 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

the frequent ritual enrichments, the divi- 
sions and the schisms, all bear testimony 
to the venerable fact that the churches, in 
almost everything but their spirit and their 
noblest aims, are regarded as either com- 
plete or perfect by nobody, least of all by 
those whose allegiance to them is most 
loyal. The very love we bear the churches 
of our choice frequently makes us sensi- 
tive to their defects, as the mother is most 
jealous of the fame of her best loved son. 
When ones own Communion perpetrates 
a folly, ignores a splendid chance, or be- 
trays an ungenerous spirit, the pain it gives 
us is far more acute and lasting than the 
glee of her enemies can ever be. But that 
pain each of us has felt in turn. The his- 
tory of every church that has ever stood 
in the community has pages which its ad- 
herents wish were blotted out. The his- 
tory which every church is making now, 
is, to its noblest children, far from being 
the history they long and pray might be 
written. Only stiff ecclesiasts, to whom 
the polished beauty of the instrument is 
an ample excuse for its dull edge, will 
deny this ; but denying it does not make 
it untrue. 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 267 

What, then, can organized Religion in 
our time, thus frankly admitted to be im- 
perfect, urge as valid claims upon the alle- 
giance of the people ? 

First of all, I name the substantial con- 
tribution organized Religion makes in the 
form of ministry to man's instinctive sen- 
sitiveness to God. It is the reality and 
richness of this ministry which keeps our 
churches alive. Without it they would 
wither and die. They may keep their 
particular creeds, perpetuate their peculiar 
rituals, maintain their benevolences, but 
unless beneath all these there throbs a 
deep, passionate belief in the real presence 
among men of the God Who made heaven 
and earth and sustains them by His power 
and love, a deep, passionate belief in His 
mysteriously given strength to weakness, 
consolation to sorrow, and illumination to 
bewilderment, the Church is bound to die. 
Churches can die, do die ; but they die 
only when God is no longer felt to be in 
them. Upon this instinctive sensitiveness 
to the presence of God in all human life 
the churches are solidly built up, and from 
it particular churches, interpreting in dif- 



268 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

ferent ways what this sensitiveness requires 
for full expression, evolve their architecture, 
liturgies, and ceremonials. It is a reversal 
of the historical process to conclude that 
architecture and its symbolical accompa- 
niments create the awe and adoration of 
those who, beneath the cathedrals lofty 
roof, kneel in hushed and solemn rever- 
ence, when, 

" in the high altar's depth divine, 
The organ carries to their ear 
The accents of another sphere." 

For who reared the cathedral, of what idea 
is it the material expression, and whence 
came an idea so powerful that not once, but 
many times, in widely separated lands, it 
has captured the human imagination, and 
bent it to the joyous task of realizing in 
these massive structures, which sing their 
way in rhythmic beauty up to heaven, the 
hope which lived in David and Solomon, 
and lives with undiminished force in the 
breast of man to-day ? It was not a people 
that believed God could be imprisoned in 
earthly walls of stone, that builded Solo- 
mon's Temple ; for the King, at its dedi- 
cation, declared in a spirit almost modern, 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 269 

" The heaven and heaven of heavens can- 
not contain Him, much less this house 
which I have builded." Not a supersti- 
tion, then, but a reverent and intelligent 
belief that the great Temple, which em- 
bodied in strength and beauty the convic- 
tion of the people that God made Himself 
a felt presence on this earth, would per- 
petually minister to that conviction, living 
in all the generations, built and adorned 
that Jewish temple. The history of every 
great house of God tallies exactly with 
that of the Temple erected by " David's 
son, the sad and splendid." Every church 
is at once a testimony to the living faith 
of the past, and to the living faith of the 
present, if it is still reverently used — faith 
in an unseen God ; and that faith is the 
utterance of the world-wide instinct which 
God has safely lodged in the nature of all 
His children. It ought to be clear — for 
it shines like a star in the religious firma- 
ment of man's long history — that the visi- 
ble, material temple does not create belief 
in an overshadowing God ; belief in a 
never absent God rears the temple. But 
once built, it stands as a witness to an 



270 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

everlasting truth, when man is tempted to 
forget that truth, or to allow other consid- 
erations to obscure it. Apart from any 
statements of particular theological truths 
which a Church may urge, apart from any 
liturgical arrangements it may adopt as 
vehicles for worship, apart from any politi- 
cal theories of ecclesiastical government 
it may cling to, the primary significance 
of organized visible Religion is its articu- 
late witness to the real presence among 
men of a living God. It gathers up into 
itself the separate convictions of the com- 
munity, robs them of any suspicion of 
eccentricity, challenges the superstitious 
accretions which tend to fasten upon them, 
and presents itself as the reflection, imper- 
fect yet real, of the universal sentiment of 
all humanity. To minister to, not to cre- 
ate, veneration and awe, are the churches 
maintained. To furnish opportunities for 
self-expansion, to interpret and direct the 
hunger for worship, and to keep faith from 
degenerating into fantastic extravagance 
on the one hand, and into idle dreaming 
upon the other, has been and is the func- 
tion of organized Religion from the begin- 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 271 

ning. To men who believe that God is the 
manufactured product of human imagina- 
tion, hope, and fear, a Church will always 
wear the look of a transparent device for 
fooling the unreflective and timid ; or, as 
a skillfully contrived social machinery for 
giving a decorous or decorative treatment 
to the perpetually recurring and necessary 
functions of organized society, it will al- 
ways be a thin trick performed by human 
hands. " I do not believe a word of it 
all," said one of these men at the close of 
a funeral service which social and personal 
considerations compelled him to attend, 
" but so long as funerals must be, and Reli- 
gion has charge of them, nothing could be 
more decorous and decent than this office 
for publicly bidding the dead good-by." 
Or, as another like-minded man observed 
with frank candor, " I w 7 ish my children 
to attend a Church for the same reason 
I send them to dancing-school, and search 
out a governess from Paris to teach them 
the refined accent of the French tongue. 
Some day they will be married, or they 
may die, and what but the Church should 
take charge of the wedding or the funeral? 



2J2 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

For the one, the Mayor is utterly inade- 
quate, spite of his authority ; and for the 
other, civil or chance arrangements are 
clumsy, cold, and bald." But these voices 
are eccentric, they are misrepresentative of 
the universal human voice when men are 
confronted with the great mysteries and 
the critical experiences of life. For that 
voice, responding not to the tyrannous 
bidding of social convention, but to the 
deep undertones of all healthy being, turns 
instinctively to the organization w 7 hich 
speaks a blessing and declares a " reason- 
able and religious hope." The Church 
does not create that blessing, it conveys it, 
utters it, accents it. The Church does 
not claim to have sole possession of that 
reasonable hope, she claims only to declare 
it in the ears of men who cherish it as 
their only solution of the dread mystery 
of death. The " burial of an ass " is ab- 
horrent to humanity, because to the sane 
thinking of humanity the brute is other 
than man. That is why men who find 
themselves incapable of assenting to much 
which the churches hold and teach, in- 
capable likewise of cordially sympathizing 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 273 

with many of their methods, still give 
them a measure of support. They in- 
stinctively recognize that with all their 
faults of administration and teaching, the 
churches do consistently voice the univer- 
sal human conviction that God is not an 
intellectual abstraction, that man is more 
than a tree or stone, and that the felt pre- 
sence of a Father " too wise to be mis- 
taken, too honest to deceive, and too good 
to harm," is the richest possession man 
can hold. And what I claim for the 
churches at the end of the century is, that 
relaxing, but not relinquishing, the impor- 
tance of formal test, they are more and 
more ready to give a cordial welcome to 
all who wish to live lives inspired by the 
elemental truth of Religion. The tend- 
ency towards expansion has invaded the 
churches, all of them, though in different 
degrees, and is distinctly declared in the 
freer spirit, the wider hospitality, the more 
characteristic spirituality, which have be- 
gun to fashion and color all their ways. 
The contemporary fiction which upbraids 
and derides the churches for their bigotry 
and unhumanness is already antiquated, 



274 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

discredited, pitiably inadequate as pictures, 
or even amateur photographs, of the organ- 
ized Religion of to-day. The churches are 
best represented by their largest-hearted, 
widest-minded leaders, and they are for- 
ever opening wider the doors that the 
multitudes, who are more eager to be pro- 
foundly moved by the felt presence of God 
than to define Him and dictate to Him, 
may enter in to worship and adore. And 
when this altered attitude of the churches, 
this splendid expansion of their spiritual 
purpose, is thoroughly understood and cor- 
dially received — as to-day it is not — 
we shall yet hear the old Hebraic phrase 
on the lips of our American churchless, 
but not unchurched, people, " I was glad 
when they said unto me, Let us go unto 
the house of the Lord, and He will teach 
us of His ways, and we will walk in His 
paths." 

I am not dismayed by the indisputable 
fact that this ministry of the churches to 
elemental faith in God is still so largely 
unrecognized by those who have forsaken 
them, because the lack of recognition is 
due to ignorance of what the churches 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 275 

stand for to-day. And that ignorance is 
best explained by an abstention from the 
churches which began to be general five 
and twenty years ago, and which is, I 
think, at its height to-day, with signs of an 
ebb, however, that promises to increase 
and become general. I frankly confess 
that the churches were themselves unwit- 
tingly, but none the less really, respon- 
sible for the defections which thinned 
the ranks of their adherents. For the 
churches, by an irrationally rigid interpre- 
tation of their several dogmas, and by 
failure to place in the forefront their true 
purpose, and, on the other side, by their 
suicidal depreciation of the value of or- 
ganization, rites, and worship, created the 
impression that outwardness of ecclesias- 
tical behavior was of far more importance 
than the inward spirit of reverence and 
faith in God our Father. As a conse- 
quence, we see to-day multitudes of men 
and women who believe in God, who 
really reverence Him, and are showing 
forth their reverent faith in their lives, 
detached from the churches, because they 
ignorantly regard them as still absorbed in 



276 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

the antiquated business of protecting their 
dogmas or mildly proclaiming that intel- 
lectual liberalism is spiritual salvation. 
And we see another thing : multitudes of 
people, unable completely to suppress the 
religious instinct, drifting helplessly into 
the depths of indescribable superstitions, 
sometimes into immoralities masked under 
Religion itself, while the churches they 
have abandoned are slowly but surely ex- 
panding in power of expressing adequately 
and wholesomely the very instinct they 
are so grossly or grotesquely misinterpret- 
ing. No patient student of Religion, and 
no one who has profoundly felt the incom- 
parable value to life of a rational and 
steady belief in God, will ever accept this 
defection from the Church of so much 
ethically and spiritually noble character as 
final. It cannot be ; for when once it is 
widely perceived and cordially believed 
that organized Religion with all its imper- 
fections — the imperfections of excess and 
defect — is in earnest to minister, first of 
all, to our elemental, native desire to feel 
about us and above us a gracious, divine 
presence, to whom our perplexities are 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 277 

clear and by whom our sorrows are felt, 
the people will return to the churches 
with an intelligence new born. They will 
share with the artist, of whom I spoke at 
the beginning of my lecture, the convic- 
tion that some sort of ordered ritual is 
necessary as the vehicle of instinctive 
human adoration. I should not be sur- 
prised if the coming revival of Religion 
had its origin, not among outcasts and 
the frankly bad, but among the intelligent 
and upright. But its note will be, not 
repentance, but recovery, — the recovery 
of the lost sense of Gods presence among 
men. 

The second claim I urge in behalf of 
organized Religion is its exercise of ethi- 
cal force in the life of Society. Righteous- 
ness is as necessary to Society as com- 
merce and industry, and righteousness is 
the product of Religion. It is incontest- 
able that there is a great deal of Religion 
outside the churches, and consequently, 
much of the righteousness which we find 
active in Society is not directly traceable 
to the churches. We have sufficiently 
emphasized this. But an impartial exam- 



278 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

ination of the influence of organized Reli- 
gion upon Society abundantly discloses 
that the most continuous, steady, frank, 
and powerful force in ethical fields is exer- 
cised by the substantially uniform moral 
action of our churches. By a trained and 
disciplined instinct they are on the side 
of right, frequently before right is clearly 
defined or generally acknowledged, in- 
variably when the moral issue is fully dis- 
closed. That they have been on the wrong 
side in more than one great moral battle 
on the morning it was joined, is freely 
admitted, but before the struggle was over 
they had changed sides, and helped win 
the victory. Every experience of ethical 
error has been followed by both repent- 
ance and an increase of resolute deter- 
mination to exercise a more clairvoyant 
spiritual vision in the future. To-day the 
churches are more sensitive to the ethical 
significance, not only of their own especial 
action, but of all those movements and 
agitations in the great world of Society 
which tell the direction of its current, than 
at any time in their history. There is a 
wholesome dread of that sharp criticism 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 279 

unsparingly passed upon them by those 
who are hostile to their dogmas when the 
genius for righteousness, or the passion 
for it, decays, and there is a lofty, earnest, 
enterprising spirit resident in them, which 
is emphasizing the imperatives of truth, 
justice, and purity. Society confidently 
counts upon organized Religion to cham- 
pion every thoroughly ethical question 
which arises. Society invariably turns to 
the churches when some extraordinary 
issue demands an untiring, undaunted ad- 
vocate. You cannot name a single frankly 
moral movement in any community which 
the Church, in some one of its many or- 
ganizations, is not behind. It must be 
frankly moral; not some muddle of liquor 
legislation nor any perennially vexing ques- 
tion of manners as distinct from morals, 
but a clear ethical issue. In any such 
crisis the churches take the side of right- 
eousness, hold it, urge it, and wait for 
the certain victory. Their contributions, 
through their unbroken, tireless insistence 
upon the imperatives of conscience, to the 
moral vigor of Society is simply enormous. 
Without those contributions no one knows, 



280 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

and there is no knowing, whither would 
drift the standards and principles of soci- 
ety. The figure the churches make, save 
in those comparatively rare instances which 
display them set only in noble architecture 
and magnificent ritual, may be dull, petty, 
grotesque, fantastic — what you like — but 
it is always moral ; it is never that of the 
Italian marquis deploring the desecration 
of Good Friday by Madame Cardinal, the 
mother of his mistress. No! Whatever 
else organized Religion is, it is the change- 
less friend of goodness, the changeless foe 
of badness. 

Contrast the impression and influence 
of the churches with the influence and im- 
pression, ethically, of the press, the stage, 
the schools, our three powerful agencies in 
affecting Society. As journals, the press 
almost without exception is on the side of 
righteousness, social and individual. It 
voices the best moral sentiment of the 
community, it values, while freely criticis- 
ing, contemporary Religion, denounces 
crime and vice, and gives generous sup- 
port to all our noblest endeavors to lift 
society up. But as newspapers — with rare 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 28 1 

and honored, as well as honorable, excep- 
tions — the press is largely on the side 
of what inevitably stains, vulgarizes, and 
finally corrupts the imagination and heart 
of man. To turn from the serious, re- 
flective, measured dignity of the editorial 
gauge to the unspeakable dreadfulness of 
too many of the news columns, is like 
turning from the crystal waters of a moun- 
tain lake to the noisome liquid of a sewer. 
The mystery of it, short of the stereotyped 
explanation that the people want it, is the 
"mystery of iniquity." No one seriously 
denies it; the press, when driven into a 
corner, admits it, and offers the indefensi- 
ble defense that a newspaper is a photo- 
graph of the world's daily life. On the 
other hand, the churches care nothing for 
the wishes and hankerings of the people. 
Not what we like, but what we ought to 
like, is the sole motive of their utterances 
and endeavors. As never before in their 
long history they seek to know what the 
world really is, boldly acquaint themselves, 
first hand, with the sentiments, habits, aims, 
and struggles of the people, but always 
that they may resist the evil and foster the 



282 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

good. If the churches of any denomi- 
nation should unite to condone a clearly 
defined immorality, public or private, or if 
they should conjoin a lofty ethical teach- 
ing with a grossly demoralizing practice, 
they would instantly feel the lash of an 
indignant, overwhelmingly united, protest 
from all the other churches, which would 
bring them to their moral senses. The 
press, with all its visibly exercised power 
for righteousness, is every day negativing 
its noblest influence by its willingness to 
make evil attractive by dressing it in gauze 
and spangles that it may be interesting. 
So dressed it is interesting, but which of 
us does not know that the public con- 
science is thereby dulled, the public taste 
vulgarized, the public habit stained? The 
" liberty of the press " is not worth to So- 
ciety half so much as the vigor of the 
churches, for what Society needs, as it 
needs nothing under heaven, is the strong, 
uncompromising utterance of the impera- 
tives of the moral law. That utterance 
to-day proceeds from organized Religion 
as it proceeds from nothing else, and while 
it may be true that the total influence of 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 283 

the press is wider and weightier than that 
of the churches, it is not an influence un- 
mixedly pure and wholesome. It stains 
even when it seeks to cleanse. 

Of the need of the playhouse to healthy 
life there ought to be no serious doubt. It 
directly and fruitfully ministers to one 
of the most legitimate instincts of human 
nature. The strain of uninterrupted toil 
is too great, the drain of unbroken serious- 
ness is too heavy, the pressure of care and 
anxiety is too severe, and the tendency of 
emotion to subside into hardness is too 
pronounced, for a healthy nature to forego 
all amusement and the hour which obliter- 
ates the acute consciousness of self. It is 
good for a man to laugh the hearty laugh 
which brushes the cobwebs from his brain, 
to feel the unusualness of a strong emo- 
tion kindled by something other than his 
chances of success, his danger of defeat, 
and to be freed, if only for a space, from 
the heavy weight upon his heart. And 
the opportunity for this the playhouse fur- 
nishes. How important a part the theatre 
plays in modern Society it is needless to 
describe. How wholesome much of its 



284 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

influence is upon the spirit of Society we 
gladly admit. But there haunt its doors, 
like evil spirits, the subtle temptations to 
mingle with its innocent diversions and 
with its representation of life's noblest pas- 
sions, the vulgar spectacle that debases, the 
clever, brilliant wickedness that destroys 
the bloom of innocence and introduces 
sweet poison into the soul. The playhouse 
is not set for the ethical health of Society ; 
it is set for its entertainment. The exi- 
gence of success too frequently drafts the 
unwholesomeness of a bad excitement, the 
portrayal of a false situation, into the ser- 
vice of diversion, and evil — evil that lives 
and grows and obsesses — is done the soul, 
though at the moment the soul is uncon- 
scious of it, as the man cut by the sharp 
stone in the tumbling waters knows he is 
wounded only when his skin is dry and 
the gash begins to throb. But the churches, 
which in the last twenty years have intro- 
duced many an attraction which the sober, 
perhaps sombre, judgment of our elders 
would repudiate, have never — save in in- 
stances too insignificant to be worthy of 
notice — lowered the standards of right- 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 285 

eousness. Their aim has been openly 
ethical. Diversion for the sake of moral 
education has been, and is, the principle 
which is intended to control the aim of 
every enterprise, not specifically religious, 
which the churches have organized and 
maintained. Nothing so visibly marks the 
expansion of Religion, as illustrated in the 
life of the churches, as the extension of its 
interest and action into scores of fields 
once abandoned to purely secular associa- 
tions or to the chances of circumstance. 
But nothing more successfully proves how 
competent Religion is to cover all these 
fields and to reap on them harvests of 
good living, than its evident power to be 
Religion when apparently engaged in the 
business of entertainment Whoever, in 
his thought, elevates the moral influence 
of the stage to the height of that of the 
churches, is ignorant of either the theatre 
or the Church, or both. And yet scores 
of us, who see clearly that only righteous- 
ness exalteth a nation and keeps Society 
sweet and true, are expending upon the 
playhouse ten times the amount they de- 
vote to the Church, unconscious, appar- 



286 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

ently, that the producer of righteousness 
makes the dispenser of diversion a safe 
person in the community. The churches 
are the doors which open into righteous- 
ness; the theatres are the beautiful gate- 
ways into wholesome recreation, but too 
frequently also into ways of harm and sin 
and shame. 

The primary purpose of the school is to 
impart knowledge and discipline powers. 
Their wards are to be informed, mentally 
trained, and physically developed. It would 
be too sweeping to affirm that Religion 
and morals have been banished from our 
schools. It would be more exact to say 
that ecclesiasticism, and the ethics which 
are grounded in ecclesiasticism, have dis- 
appeared from the formal curriculum of all 
state schools and of many private schools 
as well. But there is still an appreciable 
insistence in our public education upon 
cardinal morality, and a clear recognition 
that character is the only guarantee of the 
safe possession of knowledge. The ex- 
pansion of Religion has permeated to a 
considerable degree the atmosphere of our 
public schools. They are neither wholly 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 287 

irreligious nor unmoral. The character of 
those in whose care they are forbids it. 
Yet the nature and extent of ethical teach- 
ings in them are satisfactory to no one 
who is alive to the fact that what is done 
for children in developing, directing, and 
vitalizing moral force, is worth more than 
is done for them in the after years of the 
longest life. The ethical bent of our boys 
and girls is given before they are fifteen. 
" Give me your boy until he is twelve," said 
the shrewd ecclesiastic, " and you may have 
him after that." And he was thinking, 
not alone of the boys future ecclesiastical 
allegiance, but of his moral fibre as well. 
This unsatisfactory condition of the ethical 
influences in public education explains 
the disposition to maintain parochial and 
Church schools, which has developed mar- 
velously in the last quarter of a century. 
Those whose heated imaginations see in 
these schools a covert attack upon the pub- 
lic system of education and, finally, upon 
our liberties, are the victims of an irrational 
fear. For it is the conviction that for the 
healthy development of sound morals there 
must be a distinct religious education, and 



288 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

that a distinct religious education in our 
public schools is impossible, which has 
led so many people to make the costly 
sacrifices necessary to maintain parochial 
schools, and elicited the generosity which 
has founded other schools under denomi- 
national control. After making full allow- 
ance for the patrician spirit w T hich depre- 
ciates the public schools and exalts private 
institutions for selected youth, there re- 
mains a sturdy belief among thousands of 
our most thoughtful citizens that educa- 
tion will never be what it ought until some 
plan is evolved which shall secure to the 
future generations of America an adequate 
ethical training based upon a rational reli- 
gious belief. And we shall see in the 
future an extension of private and denomi- 
national schools, in which such training 
can be and is given, unless we can success- 
fully solve the momentous question of how 
to make our public schools thoroughly reli- 
gious without making them offensively 
sectarian. That unsolved question em- 
phasizes the importance and value of the 
churches, which are free to teach their 
several conceptions of Religion which, 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 289 

though issuing in conflicting theological 
and ecclesiastical opinions, produce a mo- 
rality that is identical. Theology may 
be denominational ; morality is undenomi- 
national, and it is morality for which we 
struggle. The claim of the churches upon 
an intelligent, ethically earnest Society is 
stronger to-day than ever, because Society 
recognizes as never before how indissolu- 
ble are social righteousness and social 
prosperity, and because the schools have 
been deprived of an adequate provision for 
religious teaching. " You teach too much 
arithmetic," said the Japanese traveler at 
the close of his inspection of one of our 
typical public schools ; " you teach too 
much arithmetic. In Japan we teach our 
boys manners, then we teach them morals, 
after that we teach them arithmetic ; for 
arithmetic, without manners and morals, 
makes men sordid." Perhaps we do not 
have too much arithmetic ; it is certain we 
have too little of manners and morals. 

In the third place, organized Religion 
urges, as a valid claim upon the allegiance 
of Society, that it is distinctly on the side 
of weakness, ignorance, and innocence. 



290 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

It is not an exaggeration to assert that at 
the end of the century we find the great 
agencies for the protection of the unfortu- 
nate and helpless in Society, not most fre- 
quently in the direct control of the churches, 
but in unecclesiastical hands. The state 
creates and maintains these agencies more 
adequately every decade, and non-ecclesias- 
tical corporations relieve the churches of 
what once was wholly in their hands. I 
should repeat much of my first lecture if I 
should describe the causes of this detach- 
ment, from the Church to state and secular 
corporations, of the work of relief and 
care. To-night I wish to emphasize the 
fact that as from the churches in the past 
proceeded the influence which penetrated 
and intenerated the public conscience and 
the public heart, so to-day the strength of 
Society's compassion, generosity, and gen- 
tleness is most largely recruited from the 
life of the churches. They are educating 
thousands in the grace of personal sympa- 
thy with suffering, in the art of intelligent 
helpfulness, in the doctrine that possession 
of any sort — wealth, health, brains, skill, 
wisdom, — is a stewardship ; they are per- 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 29 1 

petually and persuasively urging that to 
bear one another's burdens is the fulfill- 
ment of the law of Christ, and ought 
therefore to be the fulfillment of the law 
of humanity. Out from the churches, as 
a consequence, flows a beautiful and boun- 
tiful stream of compassionate generosity 
towards every institution which seeks to 
lift weakness into strength, and to protect 
innocence from the snares laid in its path. 
Out from the churches comes the divine 
hopefulness which, all through Society, 
keeps men and women from dismay and 
desertion when the tides of misery and 
wickedness roll in black, cold, and strong. 
Out from the churches issues the warm 
pity for the clumsy, the dull, the unskilled, 
who have only a capacity for suffering, 
but whose claim upon grace, wit, and skill, 
must not go unheeded. And up to the 
churches confidently goes every appeal in 
behalf of helplessness and ignorance and 
want. The black man with his pathetic 
plea for the creation of a chance to repair 
the ravages of two hundred years of debas- 
ing slavery, and of thirty years of riotous 
freedom; the blind crying for light and 



292 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

the deaf mutely asking for the sight that 
must do duty for sound ; the incurable, 
the maimed, the poor, the little children 
starved and stunted in their cradles, the 
struggling schools and colleges of the 
South and West, the whole world's want 
and woe — all are there, looking to the 
churches for a help that is never refused. 
It is a marvelous sight, a stupendous fact. 
That these churches which can be so nar- 
row, so intolerant, so theologically stub- 
born, and so ecclesiastically unyielding, 
can yet be fountains of blessing and hope 
to Society, is indisputable proof of a claim 
upon the allegiance of men which cannot 
rationally be refused. For Society needs 
to feel through all her frame the beating 
of a warm heart as well as to possess a 
clear head. Many of our finest social 
achievements in modern times have been 
secured to us by the insight of compassion 
and the civic illumination of a profound 
sympathy with those whom the harsh con- 
ditions of congenital defects, of accident, 
disease, and social maladministration have 
heavily handicapped in the race of life. 
The man who cherishes the belief that 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 293 

justice is enough for the success of social 
evolution, is not only leaning upon a reed, 
he is clinging to a theory which Society is 
fast casting aside as discredited by history, 
because Society, as I have tried to show, 
is consciously and unconsciously energized 
by the Religion which speaks on this 
wise : " None of us liveth unto himself 
and no man dieth unto himself; for 
whether one member suffers, all the mem- 
bers suffer with it." And, because the 
churches are the chief, though not the 
only, producers of the compassionate 
sympathy which works miracles of social 
healing and social progress, no one, who 
believes that Society ought to be, and will 
be, something better and more beautiful 
than a chaos of warring individuals, classes, 
and aims, will refuse to give these imper- 
fect, unsatisfactory, yet always spiritually 
fruitful, organizations called churches, the 
allegiance which their demonstrated value 
to Society warrants them to claim. 

I have no authority to speak for the 
churches, but I think that one who care- 
fully and candidly studies the history of 
their spirit as illustrated in the concrete 



294 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

working of their several organizations, and 
as declared in their more enlightened mod- 
ern treatment of their dogmas, is com- 
petent to assert that their conception of 
the meaning, value, and purpose of Reli- 
gion has so splendidly expanded that their 
future is bound to be more beneficent 
than their past. They will never be ex- 
empt from a legitimate criticism, never 
incorporate into the body of their beliefs 
all the truth men hold, never banish from 
their symbols everything other men long 
since rejected, never be ready always to 
acknowledge that sincerity of motive and 
nobleness of aim do not guarantee wisdom 
of method, never be emancipated com- 
pletely from the sentiment which cherishes 
the past because it is venerable and dear, 
never be stripped bare of the tendency to 
identify an enthusiasm for novelty with 
devotion to the truth ; but forever and 
forever, because in them reside a profound 
faith in the presence of God, a puissant 
force of righteousness, and a divine com- 
passion, they will be the great, visible, 
practical instruments for bringing all that 
is best in man and Society to its best, 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 295 

which we have called salvation, and which 
is the sole and splendid purpose for which 
Religion exists. The expansion of Reli- 
gion is a fact of history — like the expan- 
sion of chemistry, pyschology, transporta- 
tion — what you like — as the civilizations 
of Europe and America attest ; and when 
this expansion is recognized, its profound 
significance appreciated, those of us who 
have either complacently tolerated organ- 
ized Religion, or half sadly, half scornfully 
deserted it, will begin, or renew, our alle- 
giance to it with a more intelligent devo- 
tion and a chastened spirit. 

We have heard much in these last eager 
years of the duty of Religion towards the 
"lapsed masses" of our great cities, the 
"pagans" of our rural communities. The 
mission to these is energetically prosecuted 
with varying results. The churches have 
awakened to the peril to Society of enor- 
mous aggregations of people who have 
practically abandoned organized Religion. 
One prays that they may never relax their 
heroic efforts, and that every organization 
which seeks to draw men into the cleans- 
ing currents of civic righteousness and reli- 



296 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. 

gious faith may never die ; but I think the 
most significant portent in the religious 
firmament to-day is the abstention from 
organized Religion of so many people in 
whom culture, education, and refinement 
are in admirable evidence, and to whom 
righteousness enough for social safety is 
dear. Organized Religion will never be 
content — ought not to be — with the 
allegiance of those who are the weakest 
members of Society; she longs for the 
support and loyalty of her best and noblest 
sons. She must have them if she would 
wield her strongest influence. She cannot 
be the power she ought to be if those to 
whom she has the best right to appeal shall 
ignore her call. The churches' work for 
men, in this world, ought to be warrant 
enough for the sympathetic, energetic 
support of those who cannot accept all 
the articles of her creeds, or be helped by 
the use of all her provisions for worship. 
Let the churches stand convicted of im- 
perfection, like our government, our art, 
our education, our society, but let them 
also be generously recognized as the chief 
producers of the human faith, the civic 



ORGANIZED RELIGION. 297 

righteousness, and the social compassion, 
which are the sunlight of our civilization. 
It is not chivalry to allow the great moral 
and social forces of our time to struggle 
against the indifference to them which so 
much of our culture and educated compe- 
tence show ; it is not generous, it is not 
just, if men see, as in these lectures I have 
tried to set forth, that Religion has out- 
grown her exclusive devotion to ecclesias- 
ticism and dogma, and has expanded to 
the human conditions which confront her 
on every side — eager, with a divine eager- 
ness, to achieve the salvation of humanity, 
that salvation which is having all that is 
best in a man at its best, and which has 
been the inspiration of all I have endeav- 
ored to make clear as a rational interpre- 
tation of our times. 

And if this modest treatment of Reli- 
gion as the Great Force of Modern Life, as 
the Creator of a New Anthropology, as the 
Unfailing Source of Righteousness, as the 
Hope of Industrialism, as the Reconcilia- 
tion of Individualism and Socialism, and 
finally, as Uttering Itself Mainly in our 
7\ Several Churches, has been of help to any 



298 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 

one, I may heartily thank God for the priv- 
ilege of standing here to speak to you — 
to you intelligent believers in God and in 
the Society which, through belief in God, 
is one day to realize itself in beautiful per- 
fection upon our earth. 



BOOKS OF RELIGION. 



Charles Carroll Everett, 

The Gospel of Paul. Crown 8vo, $1.50. 

An exceedingly valuable addition to the theological literature of the day. — The 
Christian Life (London). 

John Fiske. 

The Destiny of Man, viewed in the Light of his 
Origin. i6mo, gilt top, $1.00. 

The Idea of God, as affected by Modern Know- 
ledge. i6mo, gilt top, $1.00. 

The Unseen World, and other Essays. i2mo, 
gilt top, $2.00. 

The vigor, the earnestness, the honesty, and the freedom from cant and subtlety 
in his writings are exceedingly refreshing. He is a scholar, a critic, and a thinker 
of the first order. — Christian Register, 

John F. Genung. 

The Epic of the Inner Life. Being the Book of 
Job, translated anew. With Introductory Study, Notes, 
etc. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25. 

A book of extraordinary interest. — The A dvance (Chicago). 

Washington Gladden. 

The Lord's Prayer. i6mo, gilt top, $1.00. 

Applied Christianity. Moral Aspects of Social 

Questions. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25. 
Who Wrote the Bible ? A Book for the People. 

i6mo, $1.25. 

Tools and the Man. Property and Industry un- 
der the Christian Law. l6mo, $1.25. 

Ruling Ideas of the Present Age. i6mo, $1.25. 

Dr. Gladden aims always to help people think more clearly 
and live more simply and nobly, — and his books should be 
very widely read. 

Frank W. Gunsaulus. 

The Transfiguration of Christ. i6mo, gilt top, 

$1.25. 



BOOKS OF RELIGION. 



Elisha Mulford. 

The Republic of God : An Institute of Theology. 

8vo, $2.00. 
One of the great works in modern religious literature. 

Theodore T. Munger. 

The Appeal to Life. i6mo, gilt top, $1.50. 

The Freedom of Faith. With Prefatory Essay 
on " The New Theology." i6mo, gilt top, $1.50. 

Lamps and Paths. New Edition, enlarged. i6mo, 
gilt top, $1.00. 

Each sermon is a beautiful little treatise in itself ; full of devout, earnest, power- 
ful thoughts expressed in a very felicitous and exquisite manner. — Literary World 
(London). 

J. A. W. Neander. 

General History of the Christian Religion and 
Church. Translated from the German by Rev. Joseph 
Torrey, Professor in the University of Vermont. With 
an Index volume. 6 vols. 8vo, $20.00. The Index alone, 
$3-°°- 

Dr. S chaff pronounced Neander the greatest church histo- 
rian of the nineteenth century. 

Leighton Parks. 

His Star in the East. A Study in the Early Aryan 

Religions. 121110, gilt top, $1.50. 

The wide interest in Buddhism, and the vague impression of its relations to 
Christianity, make studies of this kind highly opportune. — The Independent (New 
York). 

A. P. Peabody. 

King's Chapel Sermons. Crown 8vo, gilt top, 

$1.50. 

Josiah Royce. 

The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. i2mo, gilt 

top, $2.00. 

One of the most profound and best-reasoned books ever published in the United 
States. — Methodist Review. 
An important work. — La Revue Philosophique (Paris). 



BOOKS OF RELIGION. 



George A. Gordon. 

The Witness to Immortality in Literature, Phi- 
losophy, and Life. i2mo, $1.50. 

It deals with one of the most grand and solemn themes in a masterly and truly 
helpful manner. — The Congregationalist (Boston). 

The Christ of To-Day. Crown 8vo, $1.50. 

A book of vigorous thought, strong conviction, and noble 
persuasion. 

William Elliot Griffis. 

The Lily among Thorns. A Study of the Bib- 
lical Drama entitled The Song of Songs. i6mo, $1.25; 
in white cloth, gilt top, $1.50. 

Dr. Griffis's analysis of the whole drama is wonderfully interesting. — Boston 
Beacon. 

Arthur Sherburne Hardy. 

Joseph Hardy Neesima. With Portraits of Mr. 
Neesima and Alpheus Hardy. Crown 8vo, $2.00. 

The story is one of the most remarkable in Christian annals. — Christian Union 
(New York). 

Samuel E. Herrick. 

Some Heretics of Yesterday. Crown 8vo, $1.50. 

Admirable Sketches of Tauler and the Mystics, 
Wiclif, Hus, Savonarola, Latimer, Cranmer, Melanchthon, 
Knox, Calvin, Coligny, William Brewster, Wesley. 

Thomas Hughes. 

The Manliness of Christ. i6mo, gilt top, $1.00; 
paper, 25 cents. 

Thomas a Kempis. 

Of the Imitation of Christ. With decorative head 

and tail-pieces, initial letters, etc. i6mo, $1.50. 

Pocket Edition. With the same decorations, 
i8mo, $1.00. 



BOOKS OF RELIGION. 



Samuel Johnson. 

Oriental Religions, and their Relation to Univer- 
sal Religion. 

India. 8vo, 802 pages, $5.00. 

China. 8vo, 1000 pages, $5.00. 

Persia. With an Introduction by the Rev. O. B. 
Frothingham. 8vo, 827 pages, $5.00. 

The literature of comparative religion has no parallel yet to this monument of 
broad scholarship and ardent faith. . . . It is an honor to the cause alike of letters 
and of religion. — Literary World (Boston). 

Lectures, Essays, and Sermons. With a Portrait, 
and Memoir by Rev. Samuel Longfellow. Crown 
8vo, gilt top, $1.75. 

Thomas Starr King. 

Christianity and Humanity. Sermons. Edited, 
with a Memoir by Edwin P. Whipple. With Portrait, 
i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. 

All alive with a keen consciousness of spiritual things. — Atlantic Monthly. 

Lucy Larcom. 

The Unseen Friend. i6mo, gilt top, $1.00; flex- 
ible morocco, $3.00. 

As it is in Heaven. Thoughts on the Future 
Life. i6mo, gilt top, $1.00 ; flexible morocco, $3.00. 

At the Beautiful Gate, and other Songs of Faith. 
i6mo, gilt top, $1.00; flexible morocco, $3.00. 

Easter Gleams. i6mo, parchment paper, 75 cents. 

Breathings of the Better Life. New Edition. 
i8mo, $1.25; half calf, $2.50. 

Beckonings for Every Day. A Calendar of 
Thought. Arranged by Lucy Larcom. i6mo, $1.00. 

The religious sentiment of New England never had a more winning and graceful 
interpreter. — John G. Whittier. 



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